The world is moving at the speed of Nvidia these days, and no career is being disrupted more than marketing.

I host a community called RISE that’s dedicated to the future of marketing. What’s coming next and how does this impact us? I thought it would be interesting to ask some people in the community about their biggest marketing lessons from 2024. Some of these are personal, some of them are enlightening, but all the lessons are worth your time today …

Sarah Stahl, ROI Driven Marketing Executive at Sarahstahl.com

Sarah Stahl

This year reminded me that marketing holds the power to make or break businesses, often in ways we underestimate. I watched the startup I work with navigate every business phase—highs, lows, and everything in between. The lifeline that kept cash rolling in? Instagram.

When we surveyed guests, nine out of 10 said they discovered us on Instagram—not through third-party booking apps like Airbnb, which most vacation rentals rely on. By the end of the year, 87% of our bookings were direct, driven by consistent Instagram growth powered by strategic influencer partnerships.

No viral stunts. No massive budgets. Just clear, focused marketing that turned Instagram into a revenue machine. This simple yet powerful strategy helped a startup reach breakeven within its first year. I’ve always believed in the craft of marketing, but 2024 showed me its unparalleled ability to save a business—or sink it.

Mike Carr, Cofounder of NameStormers & Autism Labs

AI is forcing us to be more human. As LLMs and agents emerge that can mimic how we talk and even how we look, authentic and raw content that reveals our feelings and emotion behind what we say will never be more important.

Polished, scripted, and overly-rehearsed podcasts & even keynotes will give way to communications that are more real, vulnerable, and reflective of who we are as flawed human beings. The sign of a true professional will be a combination of invaluable insights presented with unquestionable passion.

Brian Piper, Director of Content Strategy and Assessment, University of Rochester

Integrating AI into your marketing workflow is not a technology project. It’s a change management project.

Many companies and brands must clean up their data and content significantly before AI integration into their marketing or content workflows is successful.

Roxana Hurducas, Brand Strategy Advisor

2024 taught me an uncomfortable truth: Hate is the most efficient fuel in marketing, and the most powerful buying argument.

Roxana Hurducas

This revelation came from the presidential elections in my nation of Romania, where a candidate turned an electoral campaign into a marketing campaign. There were no substantial policy proposals, no detailed plans to address the challenges the country is facing. Instead, his campaign was pure marketing, built entirely on one central message: hate. Hate the system, hate the establishment, hate the political class. And it worked.

In marketing terms, he identified the pain point (a broken system) and offered a solution (himself as the alternative). The messaging was emotional, not rational. And as we know, people don’t buy products, services, or even candidates. They buy feelings, and hate is a feeling that unites people more strongly than almost anything else.

The fact that we long to belong, as Mark Schaefer has pointed out, is painfully relevant here. Georgescu’s campaign didn’t just sell hate; it sold a sense of belonging. They weren’t just voting; they were joining a movement. The against-the-system movement. This is the same dynamic that powers communities – only here, it was used as a weapon for political gain.

But this lesson applies far beyond elections. Hate and Belonging are two of the most powerful forces in human behavior, and marketers know this.

So, do we accept that hate sells and lean into it? Or do we, as marketers, take responsibility for the narratives we create and the emotions we amplify?

For me, the answer lies in ethics. Yes, hate is efficient. Yes, it works. But at what cost? The lesson of 2024 is as much a warning as it is a revelation: the fuels we choose to power our messages can burn more than we intend. And sometimes, what they destroy is trust, unity, and hope.

Tyler Stambaugh, Co-Founder of MAGNETIQ

Digital experiences are heavily undervalued as a way to differentiate and create a competitive advantage.

Iris van Ooyen, Life Navigation Mentor, Founder of Bright Eyes

Genuine enthusiasm sells— and that ripples through best in live interactions. This summer I crafted a new mastermind and I was so thrilled about the concept that when I spoke to a former client about it, he signed up on the spot. AND offered to share it with two peers (one registered as well). This would not have happened through an email exchange. I learned that your personal energy and enthusiasm are crucial and most effective live and one-on-one.

Aaron Hassen, Chief Marketer at AH Marketing and host of Business with Humans YouTube series

B2C channels are also B2B channels.

Aaron Hassen

Earlier this year, I was developing a campaign for a B2B client, pulling a prospect list from their CRM, when I noticed the data was woefully inadequate: company emails, company phone numbers and office locations. Not very useful. See, I had interviewed scores of their best customers, and when asked where they went to find solutions like theirs, the answer wasn’t corporate newsletters, cold calls or trade magazines, it was a trusted colleague, podcast and social media.

The sources of B2B influence have shifted. Forrester predicts that more than 50% of B2B buyers, particularly younger ones, will rely on social media and their value network to help make purchase decisions in 2025. And according to LinkedIn, social media was a top source of B2B marketing investment (75% of companies) in 2024. The fastest growing B2B channel? Streaming television! 55% of B2B marketers said they plan to increase investment there in the coming year.

It’s clear that in today’s work-from-home environments, B2B professionals are consuming information like B2C consumers: from their laptops, iPads, smart watches, smartphones, smart home devices and smart TVs. Reaching busy professionals in their everyday lives and getting them talking about our brand is difficult. This is why we must move past traditional B2B channels toward consumer channels that better connect us with our customers.

Emiliano Reisfeld, Marketing Manager

In 2024, marketing evolved toward more agile and compact funnels, where investment in conversion is key to empowering consumers who demand instant personalization.

An example: From Zero to Millions: TikTok Shop’s GMV Journey

Trona Freeman, Social Media and SEO Specialist for small businesses

Trona Freeman

More people are looking for alternatives to the Meta platforms for their small business marketing.

People are increasingly finding these platforms difficult for a host of reasons. 2024 has also been a very challenging year socio-culturally, and people want to have an escape online, and that place is moving toward Pinterest. Pinterest is people’s happy space, a place to go to escape the noise of the internet and the world at large.

Research shows that Gen Z is the fastest-growing audience on Pinterest, making up 42% of its global user base. And they’re searching and saving more than other generations.

Lush discovered this a few years ago when they moved from the Meta platforms and now use Pinterest as a key platform online as a positive way to promote and connect with their audience. Context matters, so make sure you are meeting your customers in a place that resonates with them. That could be Pinterest or smaller, more intimate spaces like Discord.

Joeri Billast, Host of the Web3 CMO Stories podcast

In 2024, I discovered that authenticity, consistency, and patience are the keys to building a personal brand that resonates globally.

In Belgium, I’m seen as a peer. At conferences in Toronto, Barcelona, and Lisbon, I received incredible feedback about my podcast. And in Cairo, I felt like a hero after my keynote (I killed it!). People lined up for selfies, connected with me on LinkedIn, and two days later, my AI workshop sold out, so much so that it was moved to a larger room in another hotel.

The surprising part? Context matters, but consistency and authenticity build relationships that transcend borders. People don’t connect with perfection—they connect with real stories and genuine engagement. The takeaway: Keep showing up, even when it feels like no one’s watching … because they are!

Zack Seipert, Marketing and Communications Specialist

This year, I (re)learned that relevance is the cornerstone of modern marketing success. Whether it’s crafting a social media post or developing a full campaign, the key is understanding what truly resonates with your audience in the moment. Even the most creative content will fall flat if it doesn’t align with your audience’s current needs, values, or environment. Staying tuned in to the pulse of culture and pivoting when necessary can make all the difference in creating content that truly connects and moves.

Bruce Scheer, Co-Founder of ValuePros.io

My lesson was the power of a consistent online presence.

Being part of the RISE community transformed my perspective on digital engagement. Mark Schaefer’s Personal Branding Masterclass provided the foundation. The real magic happened when I finally conquered my imposter syndrome and committed to regular online participation.

Bruce Scheer

My journey began with a simple decision: show up consistently. This meant producing weekly content and engaging daily, particularly on LinkedIn. I had Mark and others in the RISE community as role models to follow. The initial hesitation gave way to a natural rhythm of authentic interactions.

I next launched the “ValuePros Show” across YouTube and podcast platforms, which became a gateway to extraordinary conversations. Each guest brought unique insights, making 2024 a year of remarkable learning and growth. Finally, I set up a weekly newsletter that already has 1,500 subscribers and is growing.

This has been a year of deeper professional relationships, expanded business opportunities, and enhanced visibility for our tech-forward consulting firm.

Consistency truly reigns supreme in marketing. By maintaining a steady presence and authentic engagement, what started as a personal branding challenge evolved into a powerful business strategy.

Julie Van Ameyde, Founder of Simply Social Media

When a long-time client sold their business, my routine was turned upside-down. While I continued working with the new ownership, the transition highlighted the need for adaptability and resilience to navigate unexpected changes. Marketing success isn’t just about being prepared for technological change. It means you have to be resilient enough to be ready for anything. 

Rob LeLacheur, Owner of Road 55 in Edmonton, Canada

Traditionally, my team has produced Triple A, polished video content and we’re proud of that. But we learned in 20204 that there is a large space for low fidelity (Lo Fi) content, and in many cases, that content performs much better than Hi Fi.

Lo-Fi reduces the barrier to entry by creating a feeling that you’re not being sold to. The content is more real and people are willing to give it a chance. An example of Lo Fi that works well is an imperfect,
behind-the-scenes blooper reel.

Hi Fi is most appropriate for situations where the consumer is already engaged, like a website or presentation.

Valentina Escobar-Gonzalez, Co-Author of The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever

People crave being back at live, in-person events. I just attended a conference that was sold out, and that hasn’t happened since before COVID. There is an unmissable magic that happens when people gather together. When in doubt, make it in-person and make it awesome!

Martin O’Leary, Creator of “Uncharted” Newsletter

Taste is the new superpower.

Martin O’Leary

Remember endless Slack messages and three-week waits for a simple video edit? Those days are dead. But this isn’t just another AI story. The real shock isn’t that AI can help make content – it’s that it’s forcing marketers to become master craftsmen.

Think about it: when everyone can create anything, the differentiator isn’t access to tools. It’s taste.

Pre-2024: Marketing meant being a professional coordinator. You managed designers, video editors, and endless Figma feedback loops. Your job was orchestration. Post-2024: Marketing means being a filmmaker, designer, and writer rolled into one. One person with Claude, Getimg.ai, Runway.ai, and CapCut isn’t just replacing a team – they’re rewriting the rules of what makes marketing great.

The winners aren’t the tech-savvy marketers. They’re the ones studying Kubrick’s camera angles, dissecting Nike’s brand guidelines, and obsessing over typography. Because when AI democratizes creation, deep craft to write better prompts becomes the moat. Just like the iPhone killed Blackberry by making computing personal, full-stack marketers are killing the assembly line approach to creativity.

Sharon Joseph, VP Marketing

“Advertisements suck, I don’t care, Please Make It Stop.”

That quote from my eight-year-old, mocking the streaming ads, hit a nerve. Growing up, I loved ads—their creativity, humor, and storytelling inspired me to pursue a career in advertising.

Over two decades, I’ve seen the industry evolve, from a passion-driven art form to a relentless stream of noise. Now, as a VP of Marketing, I market to the very people creating the ads that my child—and frankly, most of us—find unbearable.

It was the first week of 2024 when two campaigns stood out: Calvin Klein’s Jeremy Allen White spot and Brlo Brewery’s parody. They reminded me that authenticity and storytelling can still resonate. But most ads in the past year? Forgettable.

As marketers, we must rethink our approach. People crave connection, not interruption. If we can’t offer something meaningful, maybe we shouldn’t offer anything at all. Because in a world tuning out, it’s not about shouting louder—it’s about creating with purpose.

Mark Schaefer, blogger-in-chief

I learned so many lessons in 2024 but here are a few significant ones.

• The world is changing at an overwhelming pace, and I cannot remain relevant on my own. Being part of a supportive community is the only way to survive this onslaught.
• Every day is a new marketing day. What was true yesterday may not be true today. Be willing to let go to grow.
• Competence is a commodity. Competence is ignorable. If you are merely competent, you’re vulnerable.
• It’s easy to get caught up in the latest AI magic trick, but don’t lose sight of the fact that marketing is a people business. Work through the tech hype and stay focused on fundamentals.
• 99% of the people in the world have no clue what’s about to happen to their lives through AI.
• As the big tech companies race toward AI dominance, they are systematically and unabashedly breaking the law as part of their business strategy. 2024 was the year that “character” went out of fashion.
• In all of history, this is the most fun and interesting time to be in marketing!

Many thanks to my brilliant and generous community for adding their wisdom to this post today.

Need a keynote speaker about the future of marketing? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post What we learned about marketing in 2024 appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Unable to sleep one night, I mindlessly scrolled Instagram. The platform’s algorithm learned I love nature and served up the most mesmerizing video of butterflies in a rainforest. The vibrancy and patterns of the wings seemed surreal. And I wondered … is it real?

This will be the number one question facing marketers, beginning right now. The future of misinformation and deep fakes we’ve been dreading is here. This is our life from now on.

Is it real? We’re hurtling uncontrollably into the AI Era, and most of the time, the answer to this question will be “no.”

And if you can’t assure your customers of what’s real and what’s true, you’re cooked.

Let me explain why your marketing department’s biggest challenge starts now, and why the solution is not easy or cheap.

The world is upside down

My email inbox was getting filled with requests for me to complete secure online contracts. However, I’m not expecting any contracts at the moment, so I worried they were fake.

I have a friend who is an executive with the secure document company, and I asked her how I could tell if these contracts were fake or not. Indeed, she determined that all the emails were phishing scams, and she pointed out several nuances within the emails that could have been clues to their inauthenticity.

“But how would I know?” I asked. “When I see your company logo within an email, shouldn’t I be able to trust it?”

“We’re aware of the problem,” she said, “but it’s up to the consumer to detect fraudulent activity.”

When have we ever been in a time where the customer is responsible for quality control? The world has been flipped upside down. And that’s just the beginning of the problem.

The word of this decade is TRUST

The Edelman Trust Barometer has demonstrated a decline in trust in nearly every institution for the past 15 years. To make things worse, no company, no brand, no person is safe from deep fakes. News of how a Hong Kong firm was fleeced out of $25 million by fake video avatars was all over the news recently.

Let’s go back to the secure contract dilemma. This executive is telling me I cannot trust any email containing her company brand unless I train myself to detect fraud. (She recommended that I attend an online training program.)

Let’s think this through. Are we really going to count on the world following directions on how to detect fraud just to use our service? What kind of a marketing strategy is that?

Of course this is not just a document or contract problem. Nearly every bank and credit card company has been the victim of these hackers. It makes the days of the Nigerian Prince scam look quaint.

A solution

For the solution to our problem, let’s look at an example of a brand that was nearly destroyed by bad actors that had nothing to do with the company.

In 1982, five people died from swallowing Tylenol capsules laced with a lethal dose of cyanide. Before the crisis, Tylenol controlled more than 35 percent of the over-the-counter pain reliever market. Only a few weeks after the murders, that number plummeted to less than 8 percent. The dire situation, both in terms of human life and business, made it imperative that the Johnson & Johnson executives respond swiftly and authoritatively.

The company didn’t shed blame or place the responsibility for safety on consumers. It issued mass warnings and immediately called for a recall of the more than 31 million bottles of Tylenol. They offered replacement capsules to those who turned in pills and a reward for anyone with information leading to the apprehension of the individuals involved in these random murders.

Johnson & Johnson developed new product protection methods and ironclad pledges to do better in protecting their consumers in the future. Working with FDA officials, they introduced new tamper-proof packaging, which included foil seals and other features that made it obvious to a consumer if foul play had transpired. These packaging protections soon became the industry standard for all over-the-counter medications.

Even though Tylenol did not cause the deaths, the company paid millions in cash settlements to the victim’s families and made provisions to pay for the college educations of eight minor children of the victims.

Within a year, and after an investment of more than $100 million, Tylenol’s sales rebounded to its healthy past, and it became, once again, the nation’s most-trusted over-the-counter pain reliever.

Marketing’s biggest challenge

What’s the lesson here?

Steve Jobs famously said, “A brand is trust.”

This implies that you can’t have a brand without trust. Let that sink in. You can’t have a brand without trust. 

If I can’t trust the document signing company, the company no longer has a brand.

Visa and other credit cards will no longer have a brand.

Wells Fargo and other banks will no longer have a brand.

I recognize this is an enormously complicated issue. But I also have no tolerance for a company telling me I need to fix their problem by attending a training program on fraud prevention.

These companies (and maybe yours) need to act like Tylenol. Spare no expense to protect consumers. Spare no expense to protect the trust associated with your brand.

Spend whatever it takes to fix this. In the case of the secure document company, they could:

• Invent a fraud detector app. If they can send me a pdf with fake contract warning signs, they can put the same prompts in an app.
• Give me a browser extension that detects and flags fraudulent emails that contain the name of their company.
• Let us log into a secure portal to sign docs — like what tax preparation companies or wealth management companies offer
• Partner with the top email providers like Microsoft and Google to send these little spam-demons to their own special DANGER FILE.

Come on. There are options. You can do this. And what the frick ever happened to the whole blockchain authenticity promise?

Soon, there will be no choice

Here’s what’s happening in the world. If companies don’t get ahead of this, they will be regulated into protecting their customers.

Last month, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) issued a proposal to make banks and other institutions bear the responsibility of phishing scam losses ahead of victims (thanks to my friend Alan Ling for passing this along).

The proposal sets out a list of “discrete and well-defined duties” for these companies, making them liable to pay if they have fallen short of their responsibilities. These duties include the failure of banks to send outgoing transaction alerts to consumers and the failure to implement a scam filter.

Authorities hope the framework will strengthen the “direct accountability” of financial institutions and reduce phishing scams in the first place.

Won’t every country move in this direction?

The secure document company should be held to the same account as Tylenol. A company cannot place the responsibility for brand trust on its customers … especially customers who are too busy to take your fraud prevention training. And let’s be honest — I can’t follow directions any way.

I love this document company. It has made my life so much easier. I love online banking, tax preparation, and eCommerce. But the whole stack is about to crumble if we can’t trust them.

When your customers ask you, “is it real?” what will you tell them?

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Marketing’s Biggest Challenge starts NOW appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the most famous blog post I’ve written, and arguably one of the most well-known blog posts in marketing history. I am not one to reminisce or grow crazy over anniversaries, but publishing this post ten years ago was a unique, unexpected life experience and cultural moment worthy of explanation.

Today, we’ll look at the impact of Content Shock and lessons from one of the most widely shared business blog posts in history.

The idea behind the blog post

It was the summer of 2013. I was on a plane to give a speech in Montreal, but I couldn’t relax because I was uneasy about my talk. The topic was familiar enough — social media and content marketing. But something was wrong.

Back then, producing corporate content was still a novel idea. Content fueled this concept of inbound marketing. Instead of cold-calling customers (outbound marketing) we could produce relevant content that would auto-magically bring leads to our website.

But it wasn’t working, at least not as easily as it had in the early days. The leading purveyor behind the idea, Hubspot, had never turned a profit (ironically its OUTBOUND sales costs were too high!). Niches were filling up with blog posts and podcasts and infographics competing for attention. We had to spend more of our budget on quality and promotion just to get a few views. And it was just getting worse.

The world was flooded with content, and the easy days of content marketing were coming to an end. On the plane to Montreal, I scribbled a note — “The world is in content shock.”

The premise

When I have a new idea for a book or blog post, I never go with it right away. I let it sit for months to make sure I’m right.

I didn’t publish the Content Shock post until January 06, 2014. I had seen enough by then to know I was right. It was simple economics: Any time there’s a huge surplus of a good, or a scarcity of a good, there has to be a response in the economic system. And we had a surplus of content!

Here’s a simple example. In the earliest days of TV, anybody could walk down to a studio and create a cooking show or a craft show. The entry barriers for success were low because the channel was so hungry for content. Similarly, in those early days, it was easy to advertise and support a show.

As television became more popular, the channels filled with content. Competitors appeared, not just on the local level, but nationally. Networks were created that attracted the best writers and the biggest stars. Content became more expensive to produce and sponsor.

Television entered a never-ending content arms race. You can still see it happening today. An episode of The Mandalorian cost a staggering $15 million to produce. A few years later, Wanda Vision cost $28 million per episode. The Lord of the Rings TV series cost $60 million per episode.

And so it goes.

This is exactly what is happening on Facebook. On Instagram. On Tik Tok. On every place we publish, whether it is B2B or B2C.

And so, I decided to write about this pattern. Content marketing was moving into a new phase, and it wasn’t going to be easy.

The outfall

Today, this idea of Content Shock is taken for granted. Of course if there is more competition, it becomes more difficult and expensive to compete. In fact, it becomes impossible for some.

While I knew this idea was true, I nonetheless sensed it would not go over well with the people in the industry actually selling content marketing as a red-hot, can’t-fail idea.

The post attracted thousands of comments — more like long conversations! To my surprise, about 95% of the comments were positive and suggested that I had tapped into a market reality, like this one from marketing expert Doug Kessler:

And yet, my blog post was characterized as “controversial.” If 95% of the people agreed with me, why would it be controversial? As I explained to my wife, if 95% of the people in our country agreed with something but the president disagreed, it would be controversial.

In this case, almost every content marketing thought leader took aim at me.  I was fine with it. I have a thick skin and enjoyed the great debate. That’s how we grow. But there was one comment I’ll never forget …

The laugh

The commentary didn’t end at my blog. My post sent a ripple of conversation into seemingly every blog, podcast, and video in the marketing industry. It was great that a professional debate was happening … with one exception.

On a well-known podcast, one of the hosts was asked whether my article had any legitimacy. He paused … and then laughed. “NO!” he said emphatically. He went on to describe the practice of content marketing as having unlimited potential. There was no concern about content saturation or the economic viability of content marekting, he claimed.

In my 15 years of blogging, this is the only comment that ever truly, deeply pissed me off. It wasn’t because he disagreed with me. It was because this was a respected voice acting as a charlatan to protect his own business interests. He was lying to an audience I cared about.

This comment was the primary reason I wrote The Content Code book. I needed to insert some rational truth into the content marketing madness. The premise of the book: “The economic value of content that is not seen and shared is zero. Here is a plan to ignite your content in an era of Content Shock.”

The laugh launched a book. And I’m still a little pissed : )

The legacy of a blog post

The Content Shock post generated tens of thousands of comments all over the web. For three solid weeks, I spent almost every hour of the day responding to comments. An important point — this most viral of posts had no measurable impact on my business. It did not even result in a meaningful boost in new subscribers. Goes to show that “Viral” is an overrated goal.

Hundreds of blog posts have been written about the original post. Thousands more linked to the article. I continue to get links to that post every week. “Content Shock” is still among the top 10 posts on my site every week, 10 years later!

Over time, the industry adopted the term as a way to describe the overwhelming competition in a world saturated with content. It has been featured in books, conferences, and speeches around the world. I’ve had people describe Content Shock to me, not realizing I was the one who came up with the term.

Two years after I wrote the post, Buzz Sumo did an analysis of marketing content trends, showing that content saturation was eating into the success of some of the biggest sites in the industry like Copyblogger and Moz. Founder Steve Rayson stated that “content shock is here.”

Battling the difficult economics of content saturation is a fact of life today in the marketing world!

Spiky content

Why did this post go viral? It was timely, it was relevant. But it was also spiky.

In my Personal Branding Master Class, I teach about the importance of “spiky content,” a phrase coined by Wes Kao. Spiky content provides a bold point of view that cuts through the clutter. It goes like this:

1. A spiky point of view can be debated.

2. A spiky point of view isn’t controversial for the sake of it.

3. A spiky point of view teaches your audience something relevant they don’t already know.

4. A spiky point of view is rooted in evidence, but it doesn’t have to be a proven fact or universal truth.

5. A spiky point of view requires conviction. 

“Content Shock” is a great spiky case study!

When I wrote this post, did I know I was absolutely right? I thought so, but there was no way to know for sure. The argument was built on evidence, but of course, it could be debated. And I wasn’t taking a stand to start a fight. I thought about this idea for six months before publishing. I wrote this post because I’m passionate about marketing, and I care about its future.

If you care about something, try creating some spiky content of your own. It’s really the only way to stand out today.

The future, the solution

After the initial post, I had another insight about Content Shock. It’s not just a trend. It’s a pattern (I explained this here). Every channel eventually fills with content, driving up the cost to compete. It’s a repeating pattern.

I wrote several follow-up posts, including one framing Content Shock as the most important content marketing strategy, instead of being a problem.

If Content Shock was becoming an issue in 2014, you can only imagine what is happening today in a world overtaken by AI. Some project that in a year or two, 95% of the content on the web will be created by bots. Bots don’t sleep, they don’t get writer’s block. Their ability to churn out content is infinite.

One of the counterarguments to Content Shock was that the world wasn’t being saturated with content; it was being saturated with bad content, so true artists still had a chance. Perhaps that was valid for a time, but most niches are filled with great people doing great work, or AI bots that are not far behind. The world is filled with so much great content, all of it vying for our attention.

Content Shock is here to stay.

I think there are two solutions to Content Shock.

The most common path is the inevitable arms race. Just look at what is happening in the battle between Netflix, Apple, and other streaming services. The demand for quality content, and the cost to produce that content, goes up, up, up. That is the inevitable pattern in every content niche.

There is another solution. What if you cared for the content and even more for the person or brand producing it?

Why are you reading this today? If you’ve made it this far, it’s because you’re interested in the topic. But maybe you subscribed to this blog in the first place because you believe in me. Maybe you will share this post on LinkedIn because you consider me a thought leader, or even a friend. The content matters and cuts through because I matter to you as a person.

This is a solution available to any business of any size, and it’s why I shout from the rooftops every day that you MUST be working on your personal brand.

I don’t have the resources to compete with the biggest media sites and cut through the Content Shock. You probably don’t either. But you can be the most human company in your niche and nurture an audience who loves you as a person.

Thanks for obliging me this Content Shock retrospective. It was a weird time in my life, but overall, it produced positive results and I’m proud of the blog post.

Go forth and publish some spiky content! Thanks for being here and supporting me through these many years.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Image courtesy Midjourney

The post The Blog Post That Shocked the World appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I just went through a bizarre experience in a big brand Discord community where I received death threats and encouragement to commit suicide. When I go through something troubling and new in the marketing world, I usually write about it. So here we go.

Attacking the problem

I decided that I would write up this case study but NOT name the brand involved. I am here to attack problems, not people and believe me, somebody would surely lose their job over this incident (and probably did).

However, to appreciate the gravity of this situation, you need to know the context. I was threatened and harassed in a Discord community sponsored by a celebrated global brand. To make matters worse, while this product is enjoyed by everyone, it is widely used by teens and children. So, this is bad. One of the worst PR meltdowns I have ever seen. Let’s learn from it today.

The relevant Discord community

Let’s start with the business case for Discord. Why did this harassment occur there?

An annual study by Edison Research found that young adults aged 14-32 are swarming onto Discord to find communities. The number of those active on Discord grew from 26% to 42% in one year!

So if I were leading marketing for this company, I would definitely put my stake in the ground on Discord and attract young fans.

Community is nothing new. But if you open the lens much wider and view community as a brand-building powerhouse — especially with the Discord youth — you’ll see benefits like:

• Brand differentiation
• An emotional barrier to brand-switching costs
• Conversations that reveal opportunities for brand relevance
• Insights that lead to product innovation
• Direct feedback on product performance
• Rapid information flow
• Organic brand advocacy
• Significant gains in brand loyalty
• Improved customer retention
• Co-created products and services
• Access to firsthand customer data

… and more — which is covered in my book Belonging to the Brand. That’s why I claim that community is the most overlooked opportunity in the history of marketing opportunities.

If you had an opportunity to work on a project that delivered those powerful brand benefits, you would certainly do it. The company strategy was on target. But the execution was disastrous …

Death threats in a Discord Community?

I first heard about this brand community from a friend. It sounded like a lot of fun, so I eagerly joined as part of my ongoing education in brand communities.

The brand community had been formed in 2022, offered a few contests and giveaways, and then apparently had been abandoned by the company. And yet, there were a lot of active users who had turned the space into a dystopian world ruled by thugs.

I left a comment: “Looks like there is not much going on here. Maybe not a well-thought-out community?”

This innocent comment prompted the trolls who controlled the community. The attack on me included threats of physical harm and encouragement to livestream my suicide.

I have a thick skin, so honestly, this was no big deal. But I was shocked that this language was tolerated by a MAJOR brand community aimed at KIDS. This was a marketing nightmare.

How could a Discord community go so wrong?

As the Chief Product Officer at MAGNETIQ, my friend Tyler Stambaugh studies the culture of Discord. I mentioned my experience to him, and after visiting the community, he offered this analysis:

“I usually take a look at the announcements channel on a Discord channel to see if management has been active. The last brand communication was almost 18 months ago.

“If you’re going to abandon it (probably because someone in marketing could not describe the value to leadership) then you HAVE to close the server. They now have something toxic out there that is linked directly from their official brand channel (Twitter/X) and is completely unsupervised.

“It’s a massive PR miss and potentially destructive to the brand. I am sorry you had that experience. I saw the comments, and they were awful. The whole server just started ganging up on you. It’s a dark side of community and clearly the brand is not handling this responsibly.”

And then it gets worse

I joined this community because I had genuine affection for the brand. So I wanted the company to know that its community was out of control. In the ensuing days, I:

• Sent a message to the Discord administrator
• Sent a tweet to the general company account (this was re-tweeted several times, so they had to see it, right?)
• Wrote an email to the company’s customer service account.
• Wrote a second email to the company’s customer service account
• Wrote an email to the media team, mentioning that I was going to feature this in a blog post
• Wrote a second email to the media team.

Finally, after 10 days, I received an email from the company’s outsourced PR team, Weber Shandwick. Ironically, the company’s website states: “Brands can’t simply reflect culture — they must contribute to it. And to earn value, they must deliver it.”

This is a true and worthy goal. But it was not delivered in this case. At all.

The outfall

The Weber Shandwick executive said she was sorry for my experience and emphasized that the offensive content had been deleted. In fact, all the content on the site had been deleted. She emphasized that the community had a long list of rules that should have been followed. She cut and pasted the list of rules for me to read.

This was perhaps the lamest explanation ever. I was threatened in a brand community that had been abandoned and left to thugs … and she blamed the thugs for not following the rules? The brand had no accountability?

I was not satisfied. I wanted to know how this could have existed in the first place. Why would a marketing effort that imperiled customers be allowed to exist for a year and a half? And why did it take so long for them to respond to what could have been a disaster for a global brand? Her response: She referred me once again to the list of rules. What a terrible PR response from one of the premier marketing firms in the world.

Later that day, I received a second email from the SVP of corporate public affairs at the company sponsoring the community, telling me the Discord community had been “re-set” and that he was launching an investigation.

That was good to hear, but it should not have taken 10 days to get that response. In other circumstances, this toxic brand community could have been featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. 

The re-set

So what happened in the community?

Within hours of receiving the message from the company SVP, indeed the entire community was wiped out, including several chat rooms where people were sharing harmful content.

There was a new “ranger” in the community, enforcing community standards ruthlessly.

Many of the most dangerous trolls had been expelled, but enough of the original members remained to stage a protest. Furious comments included:

“What have you done? You’ve taken everything from us!”

“You walk in here and take our community and destroy our spirit!”

“This is no longer a community. It’s a brand mascot.”

Some promised to abandon the company and its products.

Lessons for me, and you

This was a useful wake-up call for me. Both online and offline, I’m surrounded by generous and smart professionals. But, alas, many corners of the web, especially in communities, are ruled by assholes. Good reminder.

Here are some marketing lessons from this experience. If you have a community, or are thinking of having one, pay attention!

1. Everything you do, and everything you don’t do, is part of your brand. Marketing should own every touchpoint, including the community.
2. Before you launch a community, have a plan. Who has single-point accountability? What are the responsibilities for content, moderation, and daily engagement? Who boots the trolls? What is the crisis plan?
3. I understand that a community might be an experiment. You never really know what might happen until you try. But even an experiment needs to have governance.
4. This brand community failed. Or at least the company is trying for a “re-set.” But in any case, if people don’t follow “the rules,” kick them to the curb. Your number one job as a community leader isn’t selling stuff. It’s creating a safe space for engagement. Period.
5. Tragically, this brand has become too big to care. They are probably automated and out-sourced to the max, but when a consumer like me was crying out to help them legitimately, my plea was ignored. It is beyond rational understanding how a brand this big could be deaf even after I tried to reach them five times. Could this happen in your company?

By the way, this brand was in the news a few months ago for an insensitive marketing blunder. People seemed to largely overlook it because of the goodwill attached to the popular brand. But this incident would have been strike two if it had made it to the press.

The CMO of this company needs to re-think everything, including strategy, messaging, and agency relationships. Most of all, never consider your community an afterthought.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Image courtesy Midjourney

The post That time I received death threats in a brand Discord community appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

OK, I’ve had enough of this. In four out of my last five coaching calls, the business leader on the other end of Zoom told me their main platform for content is LinkedIn. No blog. No content on a website. Just LinkedIn.

No, no, no. Also, no.

It’s time to stop the insanity. Today I’m turning you from the dark side and explaining why LinkedIn cannot be your primary content platform.

Back to basics: What are you doing?

Why are you creating content in the first place? There are two main reasons: Enhance your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or build personal authority.

Increasingly, I favor the authority strategy because I believe SEO success is out of reach for many businesses.

Building authority means you don’t have to depend on SEO algorithms any more. You create content so worthy that people subscribe to it so they don’t miss a thing. In a virtual way, subscribers are saying, “I believe in you. I’m interested. Send me more content.”

That’s a beautiful thing. But it all depends on:

Your email strategy

When you publish on your website, or even a place like Substack, you own the email addresses. This, my friends, is probably the most valuable commercial asset in your business.

If you own the email list, you have the opportunity to directly grow relationships, announce commercial deals, and collect information that can be used to personalize offers.

How many email addresses do you own from the content you publish only on LinkedIn? None. So why is LinkedIn your content platform? They own your audience, and we don’t want that.

The SEO killer

Let’s say you’re one of those rare businesses or individuals who have a real chance to win the game of SEO roulette. You’re publishing your brains out on LinkedIn. Content every week. Maybe every day!

Now, if somebody wants to find you through search and give you their money, they go to Google and enter juicy keywords. What’s the chance they’re going to find some post you created on LinkedIn? Go ahead and try it. Do LinkedIn posts show up in any Google search? No.

But what about a blog post, or a YouTube video, or a podcast episode? Yes. That’s the content that fuels SEO on Google. When was the last time you ever had a post on LinkedIn go viral? That’s what I thought.

Oh, one more thing. Who owns LinkedIn? Microsoft. What else does Microsoft own? Bing. Google’s enemy. I don’t think Google is going to give LinkedIn a search assist.

And it gets worse …

AI and LinkedIn do not play well together

A friend is studying the impact of AI on search more closely than anyone I know. And she recently made a shocking observation.

When she queried AI bots about the top thought leaders in AI and search, none of the familiar experts posting through newsletters and LinkedIn showed up. In fact, all of the information provided by AI bots was absorbed from bloggers she had never heard of (but she is following them now!).

Her suggestion: Start a blog right away! At least for now, blogs on websites are driving the content on AI, not LinkedIn posts. This is the future of search.

Evaporation Station

There’s one other risk I should mention.

Do you remember when Facebook had a popular blogging platform? It was called Notes. In October 2020, Facebook eliminated this feature without warning. Millions of people lost their blog content in a moment.

Do we expect LinkedIn to do anything like that? Well … did we expect Facebook to do anything like that?

How to do LinkedIn right

Here’s where people get confused. LinkedIn is not a content platform. It’s a distribution system.

Your brand is fueled by four types of content: written, video, audio, or images (like Instagram). For most business professionals, there really are three: written, video, or a podcast. Pick one and put everything you have into it.

Now, once you have that content, you can use social media to deliver that content to your audience. For example, once you have a blog post ON YOUR WEBSITE, you can distribute it on LinkedIn, Substack, Twitter, and other places. But your website is the home base, the primary platform, always.

Here’s a strategy to create and distribute your content in a smart way on LinkedIn.

1. Research shows that text-based content does best on LinkedIn. Neither video nor podcasts are effective because those content forms do not start conversations in the comment section. Conversations mean dwell time for LinkedIn! So if LinkedIn is important to you, I would focus on blogging.
2. Publish a blog post on your website.
3. Publish this same post as an article (not a link) on LinkedIn two days after you publish it on your website. I post a little later to send a signal to Google that I am the author of the content. I am the original source. Send the search traffic to my website.
4. When you publish your article on LinkedIn, be sure to include an attractive graphic or photo. As people scan their LinkedIn feed, their eyes will be attracted to the image, then the headline, and then, if you’re lucky, the content. So images are important.
5. At this point, LinkedIn will expose your post to a small percentage of your followers. If you can attract comments (conversations) in the first hour after it is posted, LinkedIn will then expose it to the rest of your audience, and perhaps even people outside your followers. Huzzah!

Going forward

Starting with a blog-first strategy provides many other benefits, of course. It might not be the sexiest content in our TikTok world, but for business professionals looking to stand out on LinkedIn, it makes a lot of sense.

A blog can also serve as a portfolio of your work. It provides a centralized location where potential employers, clients, or collaborators can see your expertise, writing style, and the topics you are passionate about. Whether you’re building a brand, looking for a job, or hiring somebody, eventually, people come to your website.

If you take one thing away from this post, I hope it is this: If you’re only posting your content on LinkedIn, you’re grotesquely sub-optimizing your personal branding and content marketing effort. LinkedIn and other social media platforms can play a crucial role in personal branding. But please post all of your content on your website first and then send it into the social media distribution system.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Top photo courtesy Unsplash.com

The post Why you need to ditch LinkedIn as your content platform appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Note: Today’s post was created by {grow} Community Member David DeLallo

My first interaction with ChatGPT was early last December. At the time, I was McKinsey & Company’s Executive Editor for AI. And with nearly a decade in the AI arena under my belt, I’d witnessed the tides of hype rise and fall. So, I approached ChatGPT with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Here’s how the experience unfolded:

Me (typing): Create a blog post about five ways businesses can use AI to generate new revenues in the style of McKinsey and Company.

ChatGPT: (Spits out 500 coherent and stylistically on-point words. Time elapsed: less than 10 seconds.)

Me:

The piece had its flaws. But I’d seen worse first drafts from humans that likely took many hours to craft.

Awe and existential dread washed over me. Was this technology as revolutionary as it seemed? And what did it mean for my career?

Soon I was busy fast-tracking perspectives on  generative AI and immersing myself in this new world. But fears about my future persisted. Was I going to be replaced by this thing?

Adapting to survive–and thrive

Fast forward to today. I’ve talked to dozens of writers and marketers and find we generally fall into one of three camps.

1. Nope. You’ve dabbled in ChatGPT with a few basic prompts, found its responses underwhelming, and dismissed it as hype.

2. Panicked. You’ve seen its power, completely freaked out, and ordered the book “What Color Is My Parachute?” to help you choose between nursing school and parlaying your woodworking hobby into a new career in carpentry.

3. Adapting. You’re among the 37% of marketers who’ve adopted generative AI tools at work, but you’re still a little worried about what your future in marketing will look like.

It’s time for us all to migrate toward Adapting. Whether we want this or not, our marketing careers will change. But they will not end — as long as we embrace AI as an invaluable sidekick to amplify our skills, increase our knowledge, and accelerate our work.

I’m so confident in this perspective that I left McKinsey in June to open my own business. With generative AI by my side, I’m providing writing and content marketing services to companies looking to tell their technology stories.

Here’s why I think AI will propel my career … and yours.

A tale of two marketers

Consider the following scenario:

A tech company is launching a new AI-powered product and wants to create a comprehensive marketing campaign. It subscribes to an AI tool that can generate content, analyze data, and suggest marketing strategies.

The Novice Marketer + AI: A young marketer, let’s call him James, is excited to use the AI tool. He inputs basic information about the product and the target audience. The AI spits out a content calendar, some blog post drafts, and even a few social media post suggestions. Thrilled, James pushes the tool no further and approves them with little scrutiny.

Result? The campaign goes live. It’s…meh. The blog posts are informative but the campaign doesn’t resonate with the target audience of tech-savvy professionals, resulting in high bounce rates on posts and mediocre social engagement. The AI tool did a decent job, but it couldn’t master the nuances that come from understanding the industry and the audience.

The Expert Marketer + AI: Now, let’s consider Jen, who has 10 years of experience in tech marketing. She uses the same AI tool for the campaign and receives similar output, but iterates with the tool to get more compelling content and recommendations.

Still, as Jen reviews the AI-generated content, she immediately spots areas for improvement. The blog posts lack common tech industry terminology and includes some unnecessary genderizations. She makes several critical edits and cross-checks everything to confirm accuracy. She adds links to helpful resources she’s relied on in her career.

Jen knows the best campaigns are driven by data. She notices the AI tool’s data-crunching feature and uses it to guide the campaign strategy. She also manually adds a webinar to the content calendar since she knows it’s an effective way to engage the audience in her industry.

Result? The campaign is a smash hit. Tech professionals share the blog posts widely, the social media posts generate meaningful conversations, and the fully-booked webinar pulls valuable leads into the funnel.

The Takeaway: In both scenarios, the AI tool was the same, but the outcomes were drastically different. Jen’s expertise allowed her to use the AI as a lever and she knew where the AI’s capabilities ended and where human expertise needed to take over.

The early data says…

Support for this view goes beyond the anecdotal. It’s in the results of early research on the effects of using generative AI tools–if you dive beneath the headlines.

You may have seen social media posts touting results of studies that indicate AI “levels the playing field” by boosting the capabilities of inexperienced professionals more than experienced ones in tasks like basic business writing and creative writing.

However, it’s important to understand what’s measured and how participants interact with the tools during these experiments.

• No context needed. The researchers in the business writing study, for example, admit that the writing tasks didn’t require special knowledge on the subject participants were writing about, so “the findings might make ChatGPT look more useful than it would be in a real-world situation.” Remember, Jen had knowledge about marketing in tech. James did not.

• Tied hands. Digging into the depths of the creative writing study reveals it also presents an oversimplified conclusion that AI is the great leveler. Not only do the more inherently creative participants still perform the writing exercise better than others–with or without AI assistance–but the researchers also note that participants weren’t allowed to customize prompts or interact with the tool multiple times. Such steps have been shown to significantly improve AI outputs. And, as in the case of Jen, the inherent knowledge helps someone know what to prompt for and how to do it effectively.

I’ve yet to track down a scientific study that gauges ChatGPT-assisted marketing performance specifically. But a McKinsey study on the ways generative AI coding tools aid software developers serves as an interesting corollary since the profession requires specialized knowledge. AI enabled coders to do simple tasks in half the time, but saved them only one minute out of every 10 for more complex tasks. And some tasks took less experienced developers as much as 10 percent LONGER to do WITH generative AI tools.

Learning loops favor experienced marketers

Of course, AI will get better. The underlying technology isn’t called “machine learning” for nothing. As we feed AI tools more data, refine their algorithms, and interact with them more, they’re bound to get smarter. But so will we.

Even if AI can one day do nearly everything the experienced marketer can do, this learning loop favors the advancement and participation of humans–especially those with more career time clocked.

Leveling up. Consider what will happen over time as Jen uses the AI tool. She can ask it to challenge her thinking and increase her knowledge. When she shares her qualitative experience with it, the AI will incorporate the information and provide more nuanced suggestions. These new suggestions will spark new ideas for Jen. This loop of mutual improvement keeps spinning.

Providing moral compass. Even if we program a machine to understand ethics to some extent, the ultimate moral responsibility lies with humans. Jen ensures that the machine’s actions align with our broader ethical and social values.

Eyeing for errors. We haven’t yanked pilots from planes just because autopilot exists. Similarly, no CEO who’s poured years and capital into a business is going to let a machine run the show without human oversight. The stakes might differ, but the principle remains the same.

And how will Jen stay ahead of James?

Using Spidey sense. Jen’s years in the game give her the ability to discern good data and recommendations from bad. She knows when to trust the AI and when to question it, a skill James hasn’t mastered yet.

Structuring questions. She knows what to ask the AI and how to phrase questions to get the best answers faster. James is still learning the ins and outs of marketing, which could slow down decision-making.

Thinking big picture. Jen can synthesize AI’s insights with a broader understanding of business goals, something that comes with experience. James might focus too narrowly, missing the bigger picture.

Evoking emotional intelligence. Finally, let’s not forget about emotional intelligence, which many experts believe could remain standing as the last frontier for AI to conquer for some time, if ever. Jen’s years in the field enable her to add a layer of human understanding to the AI’s outputs that James hasn’t developed yet.

The path forward is (still) continuous learning

At a fundamental level, does AI really present us with a novel career challenge that requires a radically new solution? We’ve faced numerous technology-led paradigm shifts, like marketing digitization and programmatic ad buying, to name a few. The successful response has always been learning and adapting.

So, use the AI tools. Understand their strengths and weaknesses. Learn from them.

But also keep reading books (especially Mark’s ), taking courses, learning from life experience, and collaborating with other humans like we’ve always done.

As long as we keep these practices up, AI won’t end our marketing careers; it will simply propel them to new heights of interest and success.

David DeLallo is a B2B content leader with over a decade of tech expertise earned at industry juggernauts like IBM and McKinsey. With technology now serving as the backbone of every modern business, he decided to open his own content shop, David Loren. The agency helps clients create relatable narratives and educational content about tech to build their credibility, win business, and sustain customer trust.

The post AI Won’t Kill the Experienced Marketer’s Career. It Will Propel It. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

A ChatGPT Starter Pack

I’m alarmed.

As I meet people from around the world at events and my workshops, the conversation inevitably leads to ChatGPT (which has become the catch-all phrase for AI!). The response from friends is something like this:

“Yeah I tried it, but I couldn’t really get it to do anything useful. I gave up.”

Yikes.

AI isn’t our future. It’s our present. We need to be experimenting with this super-charged power now to stay relevant and ahead of the competition.

With the help of some of my brainy friends in the RISE community, I’ve come up with a ChatGPT starter pack of prompts that would be useful to almost any business. This post covers:

1. Discover hidden relationships that lead to sales

2. Have the world’s greatest experts create your web copy

3. Rapidly apply genius new ideas to your business

4. Get organized

5. Forecast sales growth scenarios

6. Find ideal job candidates

7. Brainstorm new business ideas

8. Determine a competitive strategy

9. Create better sales presentations

10. Create an international presence

If you’re still on the fence about AI, this ChatGPT starter pack is for you. These are easy tests that provide some amazing results. I think they’ll inspire you to dig further into how AI can elevate nearly any business!

1. Discover hidden relationships that lead to sales

Ask ChatGPT to seek unusual relationships that might give you clues about buying patterns. For example, I randomly chose to learn about whether the weather could impact the sale of picture frames. The response is truncated to save room in the post.

Although these ideas might not be perfect, there are concepts here that could lead to deeper investigations and even a revelation. Another random idea …

Suggestion number one is obvious, but could a restaurant create promotions that align with these other days?

2. Have the world’s greatest experts create your web copy

The next entry in the ChatGPT starter pack comes from Web3 Expert Joeri Billast. His ChatGPT prompt cleverly pits great marketing minds against each other to create the best web copy!

Prompt: Imagine you’re a top funnel marketing strategist and you’re in a battle against Russell Brunson, Gary Vee, and Ryan Deiss.

You need to win against win and define the best possible out-of-box converting landing page for my Web3 Marketing Mastermind

This is the current landing page to start from:

<copy and paste page content>

***ANSWER CHATGPT***

Okay thank you, you did well, but you’re still in third place. You’ll need to do better and think more out of the box.

Please try again and be more original this time.

***ANSWER CHATGPT***

Okay great. You’re now in second place and in the final against Russel Brunson.

So put some extra effort into it. You want to win, remember.

Go ahead and come up with your best ideas.

***ANSWER CHATGPT***

Awesome! Congrats. You won!!

3. Rapidly apply genius new ideas to your business

Let’s say you’re reading a relevant new business book and you’ve highlighted some exciting new ideas that could be relevant to your business. Let’s ask ChatGPT for help applying these principles quickly.

I’m a fan of Dr. Robert Cialdini’s books about influence. One of his principles revolves around the power of reciprocity to drive action. How does reciprocity connect to selling automobiles?

We’ll use the prompt: Apply the concept of Y to X. Give me five options. 

Apply the concept of reciprocity to selling cars. Give me five options:

I’m not in the auto business, but these ideas were unexpected. Made me wonder how you could make a test drive so extraordinary that the customer feels they owe you the sale.

Instead of highlighting good ideas in a book, why not test them out through ChatGPT as you read them?

4. Get organized

Kami Huyse is the founder of both Smart Social Mastery and Zoetica Media, so she has to stay organized! Here is an idea she uses in her business:

If you’ve ever had a list of items you need to format into a table, you know how tedious the ensuing cut-and-paste can be. One of my favorite ChatGPT prompts has put an end to this and does all the heavy lifting for me.

Prompt: Please place this list of items into a table with one line each and two columns. Leave the second column blank.

Or, if you have data for the second column, add:

Put this list of items in the second column.

5. Forecast sales growth scenarios

We’re not able to predict the future; ChatGPT even less so. But it can help us formulate scenarios and unearth obstacles and opportunities we might face along the way.

Example prompt:

Analyze the future sales of electric bicycles by 2030. Provide multiple scenarios, each with a precise percentage of adoption and the assumptions underlying the prediction.

Result:

As an AI language model, I don’t have access to real-time data, and my knowledge is limited to information available up to September 2021. Therefore, I can’t provide precise predictions for the future sales of electric bicycles by 2030. However, I can outline multiple scenarios based on potential adoption rates and some underlying assumptions.

Scenario 1: Conservative Growth (10% adoption)
Assumptions:

• Slow technological advancements in electric bicycle technology.
• Limited government incentives and subsidies for electric bicycles.
• Moderate marketing efforts by bicycle manufacturers and retailers.
• Relatively stable consumer preferences, with a slow shift towards eco-friendly transportation options.

Scenario 2: Moderate Growth (25% adoption)
Assumptions:

• Steady improvements in electric bicycle technology, resulting in more affordable and efficient models.
• Government initiatives promoting eco-friendly transportation and providing subsidies for electric bicycles.
• Increased marketing and awareness campaigns by bicycle manufacturers and environmental organizations.
• Growing concerns about urban congestion and air pollution, leading to a greater interest in electric bicycles as an alternative mode of transportation.

Scenario 3: Rapid Growth (50% adoption)
Assumptions:

• Significant advancements in electric bicycle technology, including lighter and more powerful batteries, longer ranges, and improved designs.
• Strong government support with substantial incentives, tax breaks, and investment in cycling infrastructure.
• Intense marketing efforts from bicycle manufacturers and collaborations with ride-sharing platforms to promote electric bicycles as a convenient and green transportation option.
• A cultural shift towards sustainability and environmentally-friendly modes of transportation.

Scenario 4: Disruptive Growth (80% adoption)
Assumptions:

• Revolutionary breakthroughs in electric bicycle technology, making them highly affordable, efficient, and appealing to a wide audience.
• Government policies that heavily favor electric bicycles, such as restricted access to traditional vehicles in urban areas or additional taxes on fossil fuel-powered vehicles.
• Extensive marketing campaigns creating a strong societal norm of using electric bicycles for commuting and leisure.
• Widespread adoption of shared electric bicycle services, making them easily accessible and convenient for the general population.

Obviously these scenarios are speculative and do not represent actual predictions. Accurate predictions would require access to the most up-to-date data and detailed analysis from domain experts, but that information will probably come with time. This prompt will probably become more useful as AI improves.

6. Find ideal job candidates

There is probably no bigger problem facing businesses than attracting and retaining the right talent. My friend Spencer Crandall specializes in helping small businesses with their eCommerce, so he’s always thinking about ways to help his customers gain an edge. He contributed this idea:

ChatGPT can help you attract the right candidates for open positions. First, make a list of the most important “soft skills” you’re seeking in new team members.  For example, depending on the position and the work culture, you may need someone who is highly productive, an effective mediator, or skilled communicator. Ask  ChatGPT to compose the ideal job posting.

Help me write a job posting for [position name] at a [company type] named [company name]. Here is a short description of the company and a few specific work requirements: [text here].

Adjust the tone for someone with these qualities: [add in qualities of the individual you wish to attract – for example, “a good communicator,r” “loves to be busy,” “wants to do the right thing,” etc.] [Follow-Up Prompt #2]

Adjust the tone for someone who would be motivated by a work environment that is [add in qualities – for example, “highly productive,” “values quality above quantity,” “centers the business around the customer,” etc.]

Continue to adjust until it describes the ideal candidate.

7. Brainstorm new business ideas

ChatGPT is supremely good at generating ideas, and it’s being applied to new business ventures at a rapid pace.

Ethan Mollick of Wharton University reported in his newsletter that researchers staged an idea generation contest: pitting ChatGPT-4 against the students in a popular innovation class that has historically led to many startups. They used human judges to assess idea quality and found that ChatGPT generated more, cheaper, and better ideas than the students.

Even more impressive, from a business perspective, was that the purchase intent from outside judges was higher for the AI-generated ideas as well! Of the 40 best ideas rated by the judges, 35 came from ChatGPT.

Here is an example of a prompt used in the research experiment:

You are a creative entrepreneur looking to generate new product ideas. The product will target college students in the United States. It should be a physical good, not a service or software. I’d like a product that could be sold at a retail price of less than about USD 50. The ideas are just ideas. The product need not yet exist, nor may it necessarily be clearly feasible. Number all ideas and give them a name. The name and idea are separated by a colon. And also provided a second user prompt: Please generate ten ideas as ten separate paragraphs. 

They repeated this process several times, because generating a lot of ideas is useful.

In my experiments, even simple prompts seemed to work fine. Try this one:

“Explore innovative new business ideas in [industry/sector].”

Replace “[industry/sector]” with the specific industry or sector you’re interested in. This prompt structure helps narrow down the focus of the generated ideas and encourages the model to provide creative suggestions within that context.

For example, if you’re interested in sustainable fashion, your prompt could be:

“Explore innovative business ideas in the sustainable fashion industry.”

Now, push ChatGPT to work harder for you. Follow this prompt with a second one:

Dig deeper into the most promising business idea related to [industry/sector] that you generated earlier. Provide details about the target audience, unique value proposition, and potential challenges.

Remember to keep your prompts clear and specific to get the best results. You can also iterate and experiment with different prompts to see which ones yield the most promising and creative business ideas.

8. Determine a competitive strategy

You can use this prompt for your business, a customer, or even a competitor. This comes from B2B marketing consultant Aaron Hassen and his son Andrew.

Andrew used Google Bard and asked:

(insert website link here) 

Based on the link above, what is this company’s target market?

Andrew then asked,

Pretend you are a marketing strategy consultant. What marketing recommendations would you give to this company based on the information above?

Since Bard is currently connected to more current information than ChatGPT, it’s a better choice for this prompt. You’ll probably get a highly detailed strategy document from this exercise.

9. Create better sales presentations

Let’s face it. Presenting to potential customers is an art. Once you finally land that all-important meeting, you want to make sure you are prepared as can be. If you struggle with effective writing and presenting, here are a few ideas that can help you.

This prompt can create a very effective sales presentation draft, including recommendations for collateral material:

Prompt: I am creating a sales presentation on (your product). You can find product characteristics here (website URL). Create a sale pitch on this product for a skeptical buyer of (your product). Provide detailed recommendations for my presentation.

I’ve used this prompt a lot and the results are just amazing!

Frank Prendergast, a digital and creative consultant, notes that even when you use ChatGPT to help create a presentation, it can default to a very dry, corporate-speak tone. To combat this, you can work through a writing task with ChatGPT until you reach a point where the overall goals have been achieved, and the structure is solid.

The problem is, a prompt like “can you rewrite this to be more conversational” isn’t reliable. You can end up with all kinds of output — quite often an overly folksy, slang-laden voice that is inappropriate in a business setting.

A better option is to redirect ChatGPT using role play. Be really specific about where the conversation is taking place, the role you are playing, and the role ChatGPT is playing. Like this:

“Building on the sales presentation you just provided, Imagine that we are sitting in a local coffee shop, the kind that serves pour-over coffee that they roast locally. You are the potential customer of our business, and I am pitching you on our product using the presentation you provided. I’ve already shared with you details about the product and the terms of the contract. How would I re-write the first presentation you gave me to be more effective in this setting?”

The result will be a much more human, and natural-sounding version of the first copy ChatGPT provided

Joanne Taylor, a wonderful editor who has helped me with a recent book, offered another twist on this challenge:

ChatGPT is actually really good at presenting counterarguments and criticisms! Let’s use her ideas to build on the presentation framework Frank’s coffee shop scenario provided.

Try this: Building on the previous output, ask 5 awkward and challenging questions about my presentation on that I might find difficult or uncomfortable to answer. 

This technique can help coach you through unexpected customer challenges and questions.

Finally, let’s generate some stunning images to use in your slide deck! I’m having fun with this simple hack. Ask for art ideas in the style of various artists. I prefer MidJourney for my experimentation.

Prompt: create an image of (name the subject), in the style of (name artist here)

Here’s what happened when I randomly asked for an image of a boy riding a bike on the moon in the style of Mary Cassatt, Vincent Van Gogh, and Roy Lichtenstein:

Note that all I used was this one simple prompt to generate pretty impressive images. My friend Shelly Palmer curated the works of some well-known artists that can serve as prompts for your prompts.

Here’s an image I generated for an upcoming blog post on word-of-mouth marketing. It’s in the style of Norman Rockwell:

Please note that using AI-generated prompts for commercial gain is still in a legal gray area. Be careful with how you use your images in ads and other commercial activities.

10. Create an international presence

ChatGPT is extremely good at language translation. Why not use it to enter new markets and develop international relationships?

With ChatGPT you can translate a language from one to another, not just word for word but in different tones and styles to communicate effectively. Check it out:

You can also use it to translate customer queries you may receive in languages you are not well versed in and then frame a response in that language. I use this application to respond to Linkedin messages in other languages.

Other ChatGPT Starter Pack Resources

This is not the first time I’ve written about using ChatGPT for practical business applications.

Here are more ideas covered in previous articles. Click on the link for details.

Beyond the Basics: 20 Non-Obvious Uses of ChatGPT for Marketing

Includes:

1. Summarize survey data
2. Fast market analysis
3. Summarize complex podcast show notes
4. ChatGPT for marketing strategy
5. Improve headlines/ad copy
6. Keyword research
7. Create a mindmap for a product introduction
8. Create instant social media posts
9. Plan an event
10. Find target customers
11. Outline an ad campaign
12. Product demonstrations
13. Calculate CAC and LTV
14. Lead nurturing
15. Create a simple engagement process
16. Make your message more accessible
17. Optimize FAQs
18. ChatGPT for marketing research
19. Design your own creations
20. Adjust the marketing organization

20 Entertaining Uses of ChatGPT You Never Knew Were Possible

1. Write a Twitter thread
2. Write a novel
3. Guest speaker Q&A prompts
4. Creating games
5. Dating help
6. Dealing with loneliness and anxiety
7. Naming things
8. Translation on the go
9. Fitness
10. Coding and integrations10. Lesson plans for teachers
11. Find podcast guests
12. Handle social media comments and reviews
13. Crime fighting
14. Reduce bias
15. Furniture design
16.  Create a serialized novel
17. Prep for an interview
18. Gift ideas
19. Explaining complex concepts
20. Editing for AP style

Other additions to a ChatGPT starter pack

This article projects where humans might thrive in the world of AI-generated content.

A post on how to prepare your career for an intrusion of AI. 

Finally, here is a perspective on the ethics of using ChatGPT in your work. 

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustrations courtesy MidJourney

The post ChatGPT Starter Pack: 10 Amazing Prompts to Improve Your Business Now appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Today I’d like to move beyond the tips and tricks phase of AI and marketing (although that is still a lot of fun!) and provide something more advanced — how to design an AI marketing strategy. Let’s step back from the hype and take a more strategic view of how AI will be applied to strategy.

The format of this post will be a little different from what you normally see from me. Since this subject is so new and my own perspective is naturally limited, this post will feature a curation of the best ideas from everything I could find (with my insights peppered in!)

I will cover:

• Two types of AI applications for marketing
• Standalone versus integrated solutions
• Primary areas for marketing benefit
• Where to begin
• Keeping the customer first
• AI marketing strategy for the small business owner

Let’s begin!

The two types of AI for marketing

According to an article in Harvard Business Review, it is easiest to break AI down into two main applications for marketing. This helps us ease into a framework.

1. Task automation

These applications perform repetitive, structured tasks that require relatively low levels of intelligence. They’re designed to follow a set of rules or execute a predetermined sequence of operations based on a given input, but they can’t handle complex problems such as nuanced customer requests. An example would be a system that automatically sends a welcome email to each new customer. These applications can’t discern customers’ intent, offer customized responses, or learn from interactions over time. But this focus makes us more productive.

2. Machine learning

These algorithms are trained using large quantities of data to make relatively complex predictions and decisions. Such models can recognize images, decipher text, segment customers, and anticipate how customers will respond to various initiatives, such as promotions.

Machine learning already drives programmatic buying in online advertising, e-commerce recommendation engines, and sales propensity models in CRM systems.

These applications use data to make us more insightful and intelligent in our marketing.

Why is this important? A number of studies show that winning companies—those increasing their market share by at least 10 percent annually—tend to be early adopters of advanced sales and marketing technologies.

Standalone versus integrated solutions

In the early days of digital marketing, my company had to build everything on its own because there weren’t any integrated solutions. Today, a modern ERP like Salesforce has everything under one roof. Likewise, in the early days of social media, we cobbled together standalone apps but today, an AI-powered platform like Sprinklr offers an integrated social media marketing system.

We are in the very same era for AI. We are being deluged by one-off solutions, but the long-term solution will be integration. Keep this in mind as you assess today’s solutions. Be patient and keep an eye on what’s coming next. The future of AI marketing strategy will be a layer of AI applied to everything we do, not just standalone apps.

Before placing your bet on a host of new apps, watch carefully how AI is being implemented into your current systems.

Primary areas of focus for an AI Marketing Strategy

1. Consumer behavior

CMSWire claims the biggest generator of strategic growth lies in leveraging AI for consumer behavior analysis. The world is changing so quickly. AI will help us pinpoint shifts in consumer priorities.

A case in point is offered by Procter & Gamble’s Olay Skin Advisor, which uses deep learning to analyze selfies that customers have taken, assess their age and skin type, and recommend appropriate products. It has improved conversion rates, bounce rates, and average basket sizes in some geographies.

2. Predictive analytics

AI enables the rapid processing of massive amounts of customer data and information. Through these systems, organizations can decipher consumer patterns as they emerge, and further determine how these patterns will evolve into trends and sales patterns.

3. Personal versus personalization

Today’s personalization systems are not necessarily personal. AI will enable granular personalized experiences and customer journeys.

4. Customer experience

The low-hanging fruit of the AI marketing strategy might be customer service, especially as chatbots become more human than humans! Hyper-personalized content and offerings can be based on individual customer behavior, persona, and purchase history.

There are many gen AI use cases after the customer signs on the dotted line, including onboarding and retention. When a new customer joins, gen AI can provide a warm welcome with personalized training content, highlighting relevant best practices. A chatbot functionality can provide immediate answers to customer questions and enhance training materials for future customers.

5. Natural voice and language processing

I am already using AI transcription and translation services heavily. But this is just the beginning. Using AI applications to learn natural language models will enable innovations in customer service, ordering, and personalization.

6. Workflow automation

So much opportunity in content creation and approval, SEO, social media management, research, and team productivity!

AI can optimize marketing strategies through A/B testing of various elements such as page layouts, ad copy, and SEO strategies, leveraging predictive analytics and data-driven recommendations to ensure maximum return on investment. These actions can continue through the customer journey, with gen AI automating lead-nurturing campaigns based on evolving customer patterns.

7. Sales Effectiveness

McKinsey reports that AI can boost sales effectiveness and performance by offloading and automating many mundane sales activities, freeing up capacity to spend more time with customers and prospective customers (while reducing cost to serve). In all these actions, personalization is key. AI coupled with company-specific data and context has enabled consumer insights at the most granular level, allowing B2C lever personalization through targeted marketing and sales offerings. Winning B2B companies go beyond account-based marketing and disproportionately use hyper-personalization in their outreach.

At the top of the funnel, gen AI surpasses traditional AI-driven lead identification and targeting that uses web scraping and simple prioritization. Gen AI’s advanced algorithms can leverage patterns in customer and market data to segment and target relevant audiences. With these capabilities, businesses can efficiently analyze and identify high-quality leads, leading to more effective, tailored lead-activation campaigns.

8. Creative Applications

I am already seeing AI enable a surge in creativity. Once there are systems in place that allow us to generate content and images in a fair way that acknowledges original artists and creators, we’ll go to a whole new level of efficient and inspiring creative output.

These use case are the tip of the iceberg. Here is the result of a McKinsey study anticipating where we might have the biggest impact from an AI marketing strategy

Where to start an AI Marketing Strategy

The authors of the HBR article suggest looking at internal priorities this way:

1. For firms with limited AI experience, a good way to begin is by building or buying simple rule-based applications. Many firms pursue a “crawl-walk-run” approach, starting with a stand-alone non-customer-facing task-automation app, such as one that guides human service agents who engage with customers.
2. Once companies acquire basic AI skills and an abundance of customer and market data, they can start moving from task automation to machine learning. A good example of the latter is Stitch Fix’s clothing-selection AI, which helps its stylists curate offers for customers and is based on their self-reported style preferences, the items they keep and return, and their feedback.
3. Look at where you have the largest amounts of data for obvious applications since most AI applications, particularly machine learning, require vast amounts of high-quality data. You can even tap into public data sources. I was able to do an analysis of marketing hotspots in my home state of Tennessee by pasting public census data into OpenAI.
4. The biggest gains from AI will come from replacing human systems that rely on repetitive, high-speed decisions, such as those required for programmatic ad buying. In an ideal AI world, human decision-making would be reserved for the most consequential questions, such as whether to continue a campaign or to approve an expensive TV ad. This is where the greatest returns from an AI marketing strategy will be found.

McKinsey points to key indicators of a successful Ai marketing strategy:

1. There is a clearly defined AI vision and strategy.
2. More than 20 percent of digital budgets are invested in AI-related technologies.
3. Teams of data scientists are employed to run algorithms to inform rapid pricing strategy and optimize marketing and sales.
4. Strategists are looking to the future and outlining simple gen AI use cases.

Many sources describe the importance of constant experimentation, especially when it comes to partnering with startups. The AI landscape is evolving very quickly, and winners today may not be viable tomorrow. Test and iterate with different players, but pursue partnerships strategically based on sales-related innovation, rate of innovation versus time to market, and ability to scale.

Keeping customers first in the AI journey

Almost all of the sources I reviewed emphasized the importance of keeping the focus on the customer, not the technology. It’s easy for the AI enthusiasm to overwhelm the reason we’re here — customer needs.

Truth is, many customers fear how AI applications are collecting, sharing, and using their data, particularly ones that give away their location or are always listening. However, customers have also shown a willingness to let go of some privacy in exchange for the value that AI brings.

Marketers should ensure that AI applications have transparent privacy and security controls and that customers “get what they give” in exchange for their data. Customers should also be given the freedom to choose what data they are willing to share and be in control of how and when it is collected and used.

AI marketing strategy for the small business

Predictably, there is an AI platform gold rush going on. It seems as though there is a new AI service being developed and marketed every day. How do you make sense of what to do and create a competitive advantage through an AI marketing strategy … even if you don’t have an IT department?

The first thing you need to know: Don’t create an AI marketing strategy just to do it. As a small business owner, every decision to reallocate resources is vital. Tread carefully.

A big difference between applying AI to a big business to a small one is the lack of data. A big business needs to turn to the big data sources as a clue on where to start. A small business should look at productivity. Where is the low-hanging fruit to save money and time?

Start by reviewing your current marketing applications for new AI features. Look at current vendors of your marketing software systems to see what’s coming for you within the platforms you already use. As I noted above, it’s going to be much better to have AI integrated into systems you already have compared to new piecemeal solutions.

Here’s an example. Many small businesses use Canva for designing everything from logos to social media posts. Canva has incorporated many amazing new AI functions. This saves you the work of finding your own unique solutions.

Here are the five areas ripe for small businesses to apply an AI marketing strategy.

1. Idea Generation

ChatGPT is a champ for brainstorming. Try prompts like this:

• I am launching a new product (add a detailed description). What are the best colors for the packaging?
• Here are the results of a customer survey. Please summarize the five major themes and suggest what actions I should take (paste results)
• I want to create a new burrito to honor Independence Day. What would be five creative names for this dish?
• I am having trouble with employee turnover. Other than increasing wages, what can I do to make my workplace a more attractive place to work?
• I want to start a business and sell electric bikes. What are the top 10 sales trends I should know before starting this business?

… the possibilities are endless.

2. Customer Experience

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular and practical for their ability to mimic human-like conversations and perform routine tasks. By using chatbots, small businesses can deliver prompt and seamless customer service, reducing wait times and cutting staffing costs. In addition, chatbots can learn from customer interactions, continuously improving their accuracy and effectiveness.

New tools have emerged for under $100 per month that allows you to upload your own content files to “train” your own chatbot.

Automation is another way to use AI for customer service. With customer service automation, businesses can automate routine tasks such as sending order confirmations and following up on support tickets, saving time and resources while ensuring consistent and timely communication. Some automation tools can enable businesses to integrate with other applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, creating a more efficient and streamlined workflow.

3. Customer Research

While some large language models like ChatGPT can’t necessarily create unique customer insights for a specific business, you can “trick” it into helping you define customer wants and needs.

My friend Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media recently provided a free webinar where he explained a very clever way to create a customer persona, save it, and then continuously query it to optimize your content and marketing tactics. You can find the webinar here.

Another trick I use … Ask ChatGPT to be the voice of your customer. Provide a lot of detail about what you know about your customers. Then ask it to tell you their pain points and problems. This could be a source of new product and service ideas.

4. Marketing Strategy (to a point)

I’m a marketing consultant, and I have to admit, I’ve used ChatGPT to help create strategic advice for small businesses! It’s not perfect, and it certainly lacks true insight most of the time, but when I describe a business and ask for a strategic framework, it has a decent response. Certainly a starting point.

Here’s a little secret: The foundational elements of marketing are similar across almost any industry. It’s a pattern, and AI is good at patterns. So if you provide enough detail on your business, you’ll probably get a decent outline.

Then you can call me to make it REALLY great!  : )

5. Content Creation

This is the low-hanging fruit for most businesses! ChatGPT and its AI cousins can create blog posts, images, social media content, videos, and so much more. Experiment with:

• Audience research
• Brainstorm ideas
• Write outlines
• Build audience personas
• Create social media posts
• Write email marketing copy
• SEO edits
• Write product descriptions
• Improve website copy

Be warned — there are still a lot of legal issues to work out here. Who owns this material? What can be copyrighted? This has to be sorted out over time.

One last warning. A lot has been written about the quality and accuracy of AI content. Honestly, I think there is a place for Ai content, especially for a small business with limited resources.

However.

In the long term, quality wins. Quality is imperative. To win at SEO and establish authority, you have to put some human effort and insight into your content.

So there you have it, a few useful guideposts on the road to an AI marketing strategy. Good luck!

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

The post How to Design an AI Marketing Strategy appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

This year I’m trying to get a little more personal on this blog and peel back the curtain on some things going on in my business and life that might be relevant to you. A few weeks ago, I talked about the biggest success of my career. Today I’ll balance that out with five mistakes I’ve made as an entrepreneur.

I fail a lot. Everybody does. But the failures I’m highlighting today are special because I should have known better. Today I present to you my five dumbest mistakes.

Setting the stage

First, a little background.

I’ve had two distinct careers. For the first half of my career, I was a marketing executive for a Fortune 100 company. But more likely, you know me as an entrepreneur, speaker, consultant, teacher, and author — and that career started about 15 years ago.

As I look back on my life, the biggest flubs I made in my corporate career were probably political. Sometimes I had difficulty following corporate norms when it led to waste and non-productive work. I guess that was the entrepreneur in me trying to get out. That drive also led to my biggest successes in the corporate world, by the way!

The biggest mistakes I’ve made as an entrepreneur come from straying from my core competence. Here they are:

1. Doing work that I despise

In 2015, I wrote a book called The Content Code, which provided a map on how to create content that was actually seen and shared (most corporate content just sits on a website and is never even viewed … a big waste of money!). By the way, this book still holds up today. I would change very little.

By cobbling together research, systems, and content patterns I described in the book, I developed an algorithm that could predict the viral potential of content. By applying this assessment to your content and your competitors, you could devise a framework for content marketing success and a leading indicator for sales.

I pulled together a team to support a new company that would bring this idea to the world. We beta-tested this algorithm with IBM, a London media company, a boutique wealth management firm, and a massive data processing company.

The darn thing worked. We were ready to take the system to the world.

An entrepreneur wears many hats, and the hat I hate most of all is sales. I’m terrible at sales because I’m impatient.

Literally, every company that saw our demonstration was interested in the product. But the sales process exhausted me. For example, the day I was going to sign a contract with Oracle, I was informed that the procurement manager had left the company and I needed to start the process all over again. At every account, I faced an endless string of delays …

• Unexpected budget cuts
• Departments being disbanded
• Bosses getting fired

This was not bad luck. This is simply the typical B2B sales process, which requires endless patience! And I hated it. Every minute I spent time spinning my wheels on sales, I thought about everything I would prefer to be doing … which was pretty much anything other than this big waste of time.

So after about a year and a half, I pulled the plug. I lost a ton of money on this experiment and learned the painful lesson that when it came to selling, I sucked. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made as an entrepreneur was pinning my success on an activity that I didn’t enjoy. I’ll never put myself in that position again. Don’t do the work you despise.

2. Marketing to the wrong audience

Early in my “second career,” I was known as a go-to guy for social media tips and tactics. I wrote bestselling books on Twitter, blogging, and social media strategy, for example.

But I grew out of this. After a few years, I was making most of my money from consulting about strategy, teaching about marketing, and public speaking.

I had outgrown my audience but only realized this when I read Evelyn Starr’s book Teenage Waste Brand. This book examines the lull that occurs in brand adolescence, and that is exactly what had happened to me.

I had to re-align my message with a different audience, and that is still a work in progress!

3. Complacency

The first quarter of 2020 was the most successful of my career. And then, we all know that happened in March of that year. When the pandemic hit, my entire business crashed to zero in about 48 hours.

I was lamenting to a friend how sad I was that this rewarding and profitable career so easily went “poof!” and he asked me, “when you were having that great success, were you innovating?”

The answer was “no.” Business was coming in to me so easily that almost every phase of my business had stagnated. I wasn’t building new products, my website was outdated, and I overlooked basic marketing fundamentals like an email strategy.

I had failed to look up from my entrenched practices and adjust to the changing world. Success had made me complacent.

I’m still rebuilding and moving forward, but about one-third of my income now derives from revenue streams that did not exist before the pandemic.

4. Following my heart instead of my head

Several years ago, I invested time and resources in a start-up. This relationship had more red flags than a parade in Moscow. I knew deep down that success was unlikely, but I liked this entrepreneurial partner so much that I followed my heart.

I ignored the accumulated wisdom of my life and wasted a lot of energy on a venture that was probably doomed from the start.

Sometimes, it’s OK in business to follow your heart. At least for me, that’s where the fun and creativity occur. But it’s not OK to ignore your own intellect and take your business down the wrong path. This was a gigantic waste of time that should have been avoided.

5. Becoming undisciplined

This is my most recent challenge.

From the outside, many people marvel at how much I accomplish. I’m speaking, teaching, consulting, and I just published my tenth book.

The key to this success is discipline. I have three core activities in my business, and if I’m asked to stray outside those boundaries, I either say no or find a way to delegate it to somebody.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been crushed by not following this practice.

Part of this is because I’m a nice guy, and I want to personally say yes to every request for help. But it’s just become too much, and I’ve been dragged into activities that have zero benefits for me or the business.

An example: I receive several books each week from an author wanting me to promote it for them. The book comes with a sweet personal note and an appeal for help. I’m sympathetic because not long ago, I was a new author looking for support. But just the act of creating and posting videos is a distraction, and I can’t delegate to somebody until there is a Mark Bot ™.

Stress doesn’t come from being busy. Stress comes from devoting too much time to activities that don’t make you come alive.

The next biggest mistakes!

I suppose five years from now, I’ll be writing a new post with five more mistakes I’ve made as an entrepreneur!

My teacher and mentor Peter Drucker used to say that it’s OK to make mistakes as long as you don’t dig yourself into a hole so big that you can’t get out.

So far, I’ve succeeded in following Dr. Drucker’s advice! I’ve been able to recover from every mistake.

As I reflect on the biggest mistakes I’ve made as an entrepreneur (so far), it’s disappointing that they all could have been avoided if I had just used common sense. Perhaps part of the entrepreneurial journey is discovering your own common sense!

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustrations courtesy MidJourney. 

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