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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Inbound 2024 Recap and Latest Digital Marketing Trends (Part. 2)
00:25:56
We are back with part two of our Digital Marketing Trends episode to celebrate out 400th episode realease! In this continuation episode, we discuss the rise of AI in search engines, the challenges and opportunities it presents for marketers and the...
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- [00:00]
Kieran Rogers
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello, and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
- [00:19]
Louise Crossley
I'm Louise Crossley. And I'm Daniel Rowles.
- [00:22]
Kieran Rogers
And today we're talking about the digital marketing trends and AI Update part two.
- [00:29]
Louise Crossley
So this is a continuation from the previous episode where we were talking about all of the amazing announcements that were kind of coming out at Inbound 24, the HubSpot conference. And I was just trying to summarize what was going on. Now, this is a good point to come into this because we're going through our coggle, our little mind map that we kind of go through and I've got to the point where it kind of says HubSpot Copilot Breeze. So the big announcement was HubSpot announced. They've got this co pilot within the tool now and it AI assists you with everything, including writing stuff, creating landing pages, planning podcasts, all that kind of stuff. Another lecture, the OpenAI people were there and they said the number one use for ChatGPT is for marketing. So everyone's like, yeah, AI marketing, it's going to be brilliant. We're gonna get all this content, it's going to be easy and we get to sit back and. And by the way, you obviously see that Kieran is shaking his head as we speak. Then I went to see my favorite talk at HubSpot every year is Jay Swedelson, who has do this, not that, the biggest kind of marketing podcast in the US he runs subjectline.com I will put these links in the show notes. And he has the guru conference, which he. And he is obsessed with reality tv. And so as part the lots, parts of his talks were about reality tv. I was amazed because it wasn't just us reality tv. Everyone was asked, what's your favorite reality TV at the moment? He said, our Love is Blind uk. So he's watching the international editions of these. Anyway, that's not the point. What was great is that there was all this enthusiasm for AI generated content. And you're going to have to beat this out, Lou, because we don't have swearing on a podcast. But he walked on and went, it's going to be amazing. There's going to be a tsunami. And basically saying, there's going to be so much terrible content pumping out there. So what's the solution? Well, he did a couple of different talks, one on the email side of things, but and how important emails. And we mentioned that in the previous podcast, but he had this great talk and he's going to come onto the podcast and talk about it, about thriving in discomfort. And basically what he's saying is in Covid, he was basically going bankrupt because his agency had no clients coming in. And he was like, I need to meet as many people as possible. So he came up with this idea that he was going to do an event and everyone was like, that's a terrible, terrible online conference. And he's like, oh, no one needs another online conference. It's a horrible, horrible idea. And it's actually become really successful because the way he's done it was incredibly fun. Okay. And yeah, he's an. He has an email marketing agency. It's like pretty serious. They millions and millions of emails going out. But they had things like they were having like a chili eating competition. He was saying he nearly killed himself because he had one of these things and it was just really. And they did it live streamed and you can imagine it's kind of fun. They've got, they had some amazing speakers. He got some people in for some reality TV shows that he liked just because he wanted to meet them, I think. But he made a really key point which really stands to the conversations we've been having recently about social media not working. You know, just doing everything the same as anyone else. This whole thing of just being unique, honest and transparent. Okay. And trying to look at that and say, okay, if we do stuff the same as everyone else, we're not, we're not going to get that, that kind of tension. And there was some stats that Neil Patel had come to about the best form of video at the moment is that real rough and ready. Here's me holding my phone, doing a video, talking to the screen. We've seen LinkedIn video go crazy and they've gone to vertical videos. Quite tick tocky. Loads of people putting TikToks into LinkedIn which isn't great, but actually that more demonstrate your expertise and your experience. Now let's bring all this together. You've got Google talking about eat expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trust. We've said that social media is harder to penetrate. We've talked about the fact that getting an email list gives you ownership of that and you've got the opportunity to have the conversation. But those emails that tend to work are the ones that are from a person and are quite conversational and you keep. You've sent me like two or three emails recently, Kieran, and all of them have been of that style of just a hi, this is what we've been up to. This is what's new. I didn't like this. This was quite shocking, and the narrative kind of worked.
- [04:34]
Kieran Rogers
It's just because people like people.
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Louise Crossley
Yeah, that's it.
- [04:37]
Kieran Rogers
And that's.
- [04:38]
Louise Crossley
That came up a lot.
- [04:39]
Kieran Rogers
Kind of the brand sanitization that goes on removes that, and it's like, yeah, it's lovely that you're really consistent and that you're really on brand, but it's. It's more bland than brand. And actually, there is room. There is room in the word brand for personality. And I think, you know, if you look at any of those examples that you were just talking about there, that's what I loved about them, is the person's personality really, like, zinged through. And. And very often, you know, when stuff's corporate, it really doesn't, you know, it's anything but that. It's had. It's had the life sucked out of it by loads of subcommittees and, you know, unnecessary meetings.
- [05:22]
Louise Crossley
Well, my favorite thing was that one of the big things that Jay does at the conference issue is do a giveaway, and he gives away T shirts, hoodies, hats, and stickers. People lose their minds for free. Stuff like. Like, it was just like the amount of people that crushed into one space. And we're being very polite, but it was like, wow. And it was all loads of branded clothing, and people like, yeah, I want some of that. But my favorite thing was they had these tables of stickers, and the stickers might have the podcast brand on them. There was like, I heart reality tv, right? Because this is part of. Part of his brand. And it was like, I love if loving Love island is wrong, I don't want to be right and all this. But the point being is that that stuff didn't even have the branding on it. But you. You so know that. You remember vividly where you got that from, because it was a bit of fun. It had a bit of personality.
- [06:09]
Kieran Rogers
Here's the thing, though. Here's the secret about really powerful brands. They say more about the person that loves the brand. You know, they're a way of expressing who I am. Like, if I take that, you know, I heart Love island, and if that's wrong, I don't want to be right. That sticker says a million things about the person that wears it, and that's why people will be jumping at the chance to wear that. Just as, you know, when you whip out the latest iPhone, it says a million things about you right now. People forget that with the whole obsession with Brand that actually sometimes, you know, having a bit of allowing a bit of playfulness and fun and color into your. Into your brand. Not literally color, but you know what I'm saying, It's like a bit of. A bit of fun in there. Can. Can make that brand so, so much more desirable.
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Louise Crossley
People act on their emotions, don't they?
- [07:01]
Kieran Rogers
We are emotional creatures. There's two things, story and emotion. Yeah. It is our world. And that, that's my beef is that a lot of brands remove that from they. With their corporate cleansing. It all gets removed and it's such a shame. You know, bring. Let's bring that back.
- [07:18]
Louise Crossley
Well, I think it's interesting for this. I've been pondering on this the last six months and, and refocusing what we do at Target Internet. And what came out for me is like, what's the thing we do that's most popular is the podcast. Why is that? Because it's got some personality to it, hopefully. Right. That's why. Yeah. We've got over 100,000 people that listen every month because it helps them. So it's going to help them in what they want. Right. Which is improve their career, make their business more successful. But hopefully there's a bit of a connection to things as well in terms of the people involved. So I was like. And then you've got that. And then there's a bit of disconnect because on the website we've got this E Learning, although it's on my voice, it's me in very formal mode teaching you something in a structured way. And it's like, that's not how I teach in the classroom. So why is that? And it's okay. I mean if, like, if you need to know a specific thing, that works, great. But then it was the kind of thing when we went out the email and said if we did complete courses as audio, like a podcast, you could listen on the go. The amount of emails, yeah, that would be. That would be amazing because I like the podcast. I don't really like elearning that much, but actually if I could listen, I had a way of doing that on an app or something when I was moving about, going to the gym and Great. So that's what we do. So we've got the audio courses coming up, we've got the app launching, so that makes a big difference. And then it was like, okay, we do these masterclasses and we get, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 people along to these things, but it was like an additional cost and then you've got to go and get sign off from your boss to go to it. And it's like, well, if we talk about creating a culture of learning, let's just give those away as part of the membership. Where else can you get a load of stuff and a half day course every month for 20 quid a month? Nowhere. So there's good value obviously there as well, but it's, it's that you can connect to us, you can connect to the team, it's human, you can ask questions and it's suddenly just, it's a bit of a game changer and it's.
- [09:00]
Kieran Rogers
That thing that we clocked a while ago which was building a community is, is the crucial thing. And actually that's what every marketer needs to be focused on doing. I think for years we've been trying to, you know, crib off of communities on social media platforms and that's getting harder and harder to do. Yeah, because the algorithms are just turned against us. They used to be all in our favor, right. Because we were the only people pushing out content out there. But now everyone's pushing out. They can be a bit cheesy and, and it's very much structured around them just becoming more and more profitable. Algorithms are very, very good at doing that. You can just tweak the screws and make that happen. But, but here's the satisfying truth. People are people and they like people and they like personality and they like that color in their lives. And that's why Jay loves reality TV so much, because it's, it's filled with that. Right. It's like really, really good. So I think that in itself speaks speaks volumes, but that's what everybody out there needs to be trying to do if they don't want to get wiped out by this tsunami. This is the, the only magic bullet that I can see that's going to kind of fight against this. And, and I totally agree with Jay. You know, be unique, be honest, be transparent. That's, that's absolutely key, key to this. You know, if you have that, those. He's boiled down in three words, all, all that I've been banging on about for the last two minutes.
- [10:21]
Louise Crossley
Oh yeah, really good. I'd also say from this, like this transparency just. And the uniqueness, be careful with this because it doesn't, you don't need to be absolutely transparent. Like, you know, people don't necessarily care what's going on in my life. In personal stuff. It's not about that level of transparency. It's about actually the personality that's me on the podcast. The personality. That's me as a trainer is a particular part of my personality. I don't need to bring all my other rubbish into it. I don't need to. You know, it doesn't have to be this 100 transparency type thing, which I think there's too much of on social media, where I don't care about that stuff. I'm not interested in the fact that you did this, did that. But the. But saying that Jade is making an initial point which was like, what did you have for breakfast? And it's like, that's actually interesting. Like, why. Why did you eat that breakfast? There's a story behind why you had that. We were in a rush. Was it the fact that you're on a diet because you're like, you know, and he was saying, say, I knew I was coming on stage, so I've been eating horrible food for months because I've been trying to lose some weight because I'm getting fat. And it just. Okay, so that's some personality, right? So you can make anything interesting if you just think about what's the human story behind it. So I thought that was. That was great. Let's. Let's move on because Jay's going to come on and he'll talk about all this stuff a lot more. The guru conference is actually coming up, so we'll put that link in. It's a free online conference. Amazing speakers as normal. Well, I want to. There's two other kind of main topics or businesses I want to go to in this episode. One is OpenAI came on, spoke about some stuff that I thought, well, that I haven't really clocked that that's really interesting. So chatgpt, the first. One of the first things he said, and this made me on my brain kind of go, okay, is that the use of these generative AIs, the cost of using them is the fastest depreciating technology in history. It means it's got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, quicker and quicker and quicker. So In March of 2023, a year and a bit ago, to get a million tokens. Now, the way it works, if you're using the API, the programming interface, to access this stuff, because you want to create a tool that utilizes some of their functionality. Okay. And rough, very loosely. A token is a word, right? So you're sending backwards and forwards. And if you want to do a million words, that would cost you $36 or thereabouts. Okay. So it could get pretty expensive pretty quickly. So Say you're giving something away free. People are using this AI tool. Your, your, your bill is going to get pretty quick, pretty big, pretty quick. Now, September 24th, when they announced this, the current version of the large language model that kind of buy it so 4o mini. So it's 4omni. So mini is the kind of faster version of this one was 25 cents for a million tokens. Okay, that's bonkers, right? So what it means is the ability for people now to build things that utilize this technology has become infinitely easier and very, very much cheaper. Which means you're going to see an explosion of AI tools and everything that you get is going to have AI baked into it to assist you. So the reality is that, yes, it's great that you've got a little chat thing that's got AI, but actually this will just be baked in to make loads of stuff useful as well. So I think that there's a, there's a great, obviously that the other thing is that if people haven't kind of clocked onto it as well, ChatGPT, the latest version at this kind of given time is 01. There's a preview of O1. 01 is light years ahead of all the other models from a reasoning point of view and I love the context they gave for this. So if you want to do something quick, use the 4O mini. Like you want to write some five variations for a subject line. If it's a five minute task, right, that's a good, good model to use. If you've got something that's like an hour task that normally take you about an hour, so you're writing a report or you're writing an article or something like that, then for Omni is probably a good way to go with that stuff. Whereas if you had a task that was only going to take you a day, you can write a strategy or something like that, then, then 1 O is the way to go. And it's brilliant because what it will do, you give it a kind of challenge and it will come up with like six or seven different kind of solutions to doing it and then it will reason through it and try and work out what's the best approach to doing it. So it can answer really challenging questions, you can give it data and say, where should I focus my marketing budget? And it does some really incredible analysis which we tested this six months ago. Didn't work, didn't work at all. So if you haven't played with it, some people referring to it as Strawberry was the Kind of code name that for it as well. So to take a look at that. So that's. That really pleased you.
- [14:49]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah. Queue a whole bunch of fruit names for you. I'd prefer that I can code this.
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Louise Crossley
0, 1 and 4 omni.
- [14:55]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah, you lost me there. I just got a bit confused. But all, all I got from that was there are different versions for different levels of tasks but I'll have to Google it now to find it. We can put, we can put this in the show notes.
- [15:08]
Louise Crossley
We will put it in the show notes.
- [15:10]
Kieran Rogers
I, I had a moment of chat GPT this morning where I was asking it to do things and what it was coming out with I wasn't happy with at all. I'm like what's going on here? And what had actually gone on was I hadn't logged in to my paid account, I was in the free version. And it just shows you how like how much that's, that's like improved like it was quite shocking because I guess we're all getting used to its ability to do quite complex things and stream quite complex logic.
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Louise Crossley
Yeah, this is the difference because the newer models are so much better than the previous ones and it's moving on so quickly. So yeah, definitely worth playing around with. The other thing was that they talked a lot about search GPT. They are launching a search engine. Now the difference being, and I mentioned this briefly before, is that you go to Google and you get that search generative experience but it gives you an answer that's AI generated, which is pretty good. The difference is with search GPT you do a search and it gives you a result but then the next search you do is in the context of that so it remembers what you did last. So if you say right, what, what, what's the best place to surf in this region or in this country? And it will say, well this is what people think. This is general consensus and they go what's the weather going to be like there on this, this week? And you know, it knows where you're talking about so you can have that interactive conversation with it to, to develop your, your kind of thing. And that's, that's missing. I'm sure Google can do that, but.
- [16:27]
Kieran Rogers
This whole business terrifies me. I think this is, should be the thing everybody's really worried about going into next year. What happens when AI search gives you the exact answer you need? What happens in the world for marketing when, you know, the search page result of 10 to 12 things becomes 1 thing? And it was something that I asked the guys at Google about, and they're like actively exploring this at the moment. I think the good thing is, you know, that whole stat you gave where, you know, 15% of things have never been asked for before is new and the sheer volume of things that are being used, but, you know, is there enough volume there to satisfy everybody?
- [17:10]
Louise Crossley
Well, it's different use cases.
- [17:12]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah. And like, how's that going to, how's that going to translate and work? You know, at the moment, you know, we've gone from really enjoying lots of potential links for SEO on that first page where you've got sort of potentially eight or nine plus, you know, three or four ads as well, potentially as well. And I think, you know, how that space shapes out, we don't know yet, like no one's really released that, but how that space shapes out. And it's, it's going to be, it's going to be interesting. Like any one of these platforms could come up with something that actually, you know, does it better than Google does. And that for Google, I'm sure is terrifying as well because there's so much infrastructure and stuff tied up within that.
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Louise Crossley
Well, the difference being as well, that if you're using a pro account, ChatGPT, you're paying a subscription, whereas with Google they sell advertising. And that's become harder and harder because the lack of third party cookies, because people are potentially going to these AI search engines, potentially. But also the fact that the cost of processing power doing the AI stuff is costing them more money as well. So I think it is interesting, but I think it's a use case thing. Right. So if I want to explore a topic like where I'm going on holiday, interacting with AI might make a sensible thing. If I'm trying to find the best place to do a course online, I probably want to go through a few different options and do it slightly differently. Now the AI will certainly learn that and approach it slightly differently, but it probably means things like online reviews and community discussions and the stuff that's going on in Reddit and all that stuff becomes more important because that's what's feeding the AIs in the first place for me.
- [18:47]
Kieran Rogers
Still, the only life raft to this is your own first party data.
- [18:51]
Louise Crossley
Right.
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Kieran Rogers
And email lists.
- [18:53]
Louise Crossley
Yeah.
- [18:54]
Kieran Rogers
Because that whole landscape again, Louise, you were saying how any one platform can like disappear on social media. So equally for any one strategy because, you know, you might be dining out as I'm sure a lot of you are on, on search ads. But that could change. Maybe not for everybody, but for some portions. We've seen that, you know, we've seen that happen in the travel industry, for example. You know, that changed overnight. Suddenly everything could be done through a search engine. You know, you didn't even need to visit the said website. So one to watch, I think. But yeah, I'm. That's, that's what's keeping me up at night worrying about stuff like that.
- [19:28]
Louise Crossley
Yeah. So let's, let's move that. In the last, the first part of this and the previous episode, we talked a lot about Google Ads. I just wanted to mention LinkedIn ads. Let's be to be specific. But what's interesting is they released a load of stuff at Inbound that's trying to do very similar things that we talked about with Google Ads with this first party data piece. So they released their conversions API or CAPI as they're kind of calling it. And what that allows you to do is connect LinkedIn to first party data. So to your CRM system, to your website in some way, to lots of other systems, you can bring those in. And so for example, what you can see is how are your ads within LinkedIn maybe not driving a sale directly, you can measure that. But is it maybe moving people down your lead stages? So if you've got a complicated B2B and you've got like six different lead stages, you can see, well actually the person that clicked on that content moved forward three stages. You've also then got this thing called the Revenue Attribution Report. Rar. And again if you sync your CRM up into this now be careful of this because they'll say, well you need this LinkedIn account, you need a sales navigator plus account. And then your CRM will say, well yes, you need this particular version so it can all get quite expensive. And that was my other observation with HubSpot was that they released all this data but you needed like we used the marketing version of it, but then you needed the sales version as well and you needed the content version and it's suddenly like tripling your cost. So be caution of that. But it just interested me that they're doing exactly the same thing and that they're bringing all that first party data in. So you can say okay, how is the stuff that I'm doing in LinkedIn because the comment that was made, LinkedIn ads, what they basically says they cost bottom of the funnel. As in, you know, you're trying to get people that are just at the right point of doing, but they act like top of the funnel. The people that click. So it's like, oh, that's not good, because it's costing loads of money and it's not really converting because you can't really untangle it very easily.
- [21:20]
Kieran Rogers
So do they think this new way of doing it solves that?
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Louise Crossley
Well, what it should do is give you a much clearer view of what's happening to those people that click on your ads. What do they go on to do? Do they come back to the website multiple times? Do they change their lead data? You just. You haven't got that view otherwise, unless you're tying those two things together. So I think LinkedIn have realized, unless they can bring that CRM data together with this, that people aren't going to spend the money on the advertising. So, yeah, I think that's really interesting. Couple other things that came out that were brand new for me, there's something called LinkedIn Marketing Labs. And LinkedIn Marketing Labs is loads of training and certification. All of this stuff. They've basically got a training portal, not the Linda Learning stuff that's on everything, but this is very specific to LinkedIn ad. So I'd go and take a look at that and we'll put that into the show notes as well. And then there was this thing called Business Manager and I was like, well, I've got a business page and my business is listed and I've got an ad account. Is that not the same thing? It's not. So what you need to do, if you just search LinkedIn business manager, you register your company name. So it's probably a good time to do this now before everyone kind of gets your company name. And then what you can do is you connect various pages and various ad accounts into your Business manager and you can connect your staff into that as well. And that's where you get that revenue attribution report. So if you're connecting all this stuff up, you can get some spirit reports, but it just means you can manage everything in one place, which is nice, because what you can then do is you can create an audience. So maybe connect it to your CRM system. So these are all my paying customers at the moment, but you can then use that across multiple ad accounts and you could never do that kind of stuff before. So it's just allowing you to manage things. It's like Meta Business Suite, but hopefully a lot nicer to use. Well, yes, because it would be hard to be worse to use, wouldn't it? Because Meta Business Suite is horrifically disjointed. This did feel a bit. Yeah, this did feel really disjointed as well, to be honest, because I didn't know this existed.
- [23:13]
Kieran Rogers
To hear you say that, I thought it was just because I was old.
- [23:16]
Louise Crossley
No.
- [23:16]
Kieran Rogers
A bit inflexible, but I've always hated it as well. I've just kept that to myself.
- [23:20]
Louise Crossley
Horrible. Google Ads is getting better. But even that is so horrifically overly complex sometimes that it's not always the easiest to use. But I think yeah, because they keep bolting bits on, you can end up with an account and then you have to log in again to a different section and then join the account anyway, it all gets bit complicated. So if you are doing LinkedIn advertising, set your business manager up and start looking at these conversions, API and the revenue attribution report. Because it's the stuff like in Google Ads that's taking the first party data, it's allowing them to use AI to target stuff and it means you can untangle where your spend is is going on a little bit more as well. So that brings me to update end all my updates from from kind of inbound. Rather shockingly, inbound is not in Boston next year, it's in San Francisco. So I'm not happy about that at.
- [24:08]
Kieran Rogers
All because I always wear a flower in your hair.
- [24:10]
Louise Crossley
I will do but it it that kind of completely floated by Louise.
- [24:14]
Kieran Rogers
That's the song Louise. Oh, is it?
- [24:16]
Louise Crossley
Yeah, after. So you need to visualize this now because Kieran will be playing this to Louise and Louise will have her.
- [24:23]
Kieran Rogers
We did this.
- [24:24]
Louise Crossley
Her look on her face of like I'll tolerate this for a little while but I'm not going to tolerate it for much longer. So anyway, thank you for listening to the digital marketing podcast and this was our 401st episode. So thank you for joining us. Couple of things as ever, if you're not in the newsletter Targetinternet.com Newsletter if you want the show notes, all the stuff that we've spoken about will be there. Target Internet.com podcast Kieran, go ahead.
- [24:48]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah, so look, 401 episodes. If you haven't already, please leave us a Review. Please, please.
- [24:57]
Louise Crossley
Targetinternet.com review and if you go through and screenshot it, good or bad, we will. If you want some merchandise, we'll send you some merchandise as well. We've got mugs and memory sticks and stickers and all sorts of fun things and the mugs are aces because they're like jumbo sized huge. So yeah, they're very, very good. So I'm very pleased with those. So thank you as ever for listening, for sticking with us for 401 episodes. Particularly if you've been listening. If you've been listening since the beginning.
- [25:24]
Kieran Rogers
Some people have.
- [25:25]
Louise Crossley
I know.
- [25:25]
Kieran Rogers
Some people listen to every single back episode.
- [25:28]
Louise Crossley
Yeah, that's the other thing. The only place they're all all available is on the Target Internet website. So you get the last hundred in all of the platforms. But if you want to go beyond that, then we've got all that stuff as well. So thank you for listening. Thank you guys for being such a lovely co host. And I will speak to you again on the Digital Marketing podcast. For more episodes resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet.com forward/podcast.