If generative AI is the future of marketing (and media in general), how can you compete with other marketers if ALL OF US have access to the same tools?

We can all create amazing images, videos (soon), and articles. We can all use the most amazing copywriter as a template to write our own copy. We can even develop entire marketing plans in SECONDS.

We can also research almost any topic to justify the claims that we make for the products and services we’re trying sell… in almost no time.

Basically, pretty soon we’ll all be able to build anything we want to help our clients sell whatever they want with little effort… but is it a good thing?

It means UNLIMITED competition which may be a problem, but more importantly, it means that all businesses will soon lose the competitive advantage known as “professionalism.”

Why “Professional” Marketing Assets Aren’t Special Anymore

Back in the good ol’ days of digital marketing, if you could produce professional copy and visuals, you would be ahead of 90% of your competitors.

Writing consistent copy WAS hard.

Generating professional graphics WAS hard.

Producing professional pictures and videos WAS hard.

Now, professional marketing assets aren’t just widespread and more available than ever before, they’re LESS effective than user generated content (UGC) in most cases!

According to a Nielsen study, 92% of consumers trust organic, user-generated content more than they trust traditional advertising.

Why is UGC content more effective than professionally created content? It feels genuine and trustworthy.

Even if UGC content is made for personal gain (e.g. influencers, sponsored individuals, affiliates, etc.), it doesn’t matter to the viewer. They just see amateur content made about a product or service they might be interested in. They’ll trust that much faster than the fanciest commercial you can make.

UGC materials don’t need to PROVE anything, we as marketers do.

How Can Professional Content Keep Up with UGC?

So, what can marketers do to influence viewers the same way unpaid (or low paid) amateurs do with UGC?

The answer isn’t simple, but it is necessary.

If we need to produce professional content AND it needs to be compelling, we’re going to have to start proving ourselves in real world situations.

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We all sell high quality, well-vetted products and services (of course), but a list of features, benefits, and even testimonials isn’t going to be compelling enough any more. People want proof, and there’s something we can do to directly provide it.

How Case Studies Can Deliver Results Like UGC

Case studies are the professional business/marketing equivalent to User Generated Content.

Here’s what makes UGC effective:

• Authenticity: UGC is perceived as genuine, fostering trust and credibility.
• Relatability: Real user experiences make it easier for potential customers to envision product use.
• Social Proof: Positive interactions in UGC serve as powerful endorsements, boosting confidence.
• Diverse Perspectives: UGC provides varied viewpoints, appealing to a broader audience.
• Engagement: UGC generates higher engagement, fostering a sense of community around the brand.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Leveraging UGC is more budget-friendly compared to producing polished branded content.
• Scalability: UGC can be easily scaled, allowing for continuous and diverse content creation.
• Emotional Connection: UGC can evoke emotional responses, creating a stronger brand connection.
• Word of Mouth: UGC acts as digital word of mouth, amplifying the brand message organically.
• Adaptability: UGC can be adapted for various channels, maximizing its reach and impact.

Now, let’s look at what makes case studies compelling:

• Authenticity: Like UGC, case studies are authentic and based on real experiences, fostering trust.
• Relatability: Case studies provide real-world examples, making it easier for potential customers to relate.
• Social Proof: They serve as powerful social proof, showcasing successful experiences with the product or service.
• Diverse Perspectives: Case studies often include diverse perspectives, offering a well-rounded view of the product’s impact.
• Engagement: Well-crafted case studies can engage readers, drawing them into a narrative that highlights the value of the product or service.
• Cost-Effectiveness: While creating case studies involves some investment, they can be cost-effective compared to other forms of content creation.
• Scalability: Case studies, once created, can be shared across various platforms, maximizing their reach.
• Emotional Connection: Effective case studies can evoke emotions, creating a deeper connection with the audience.
• Word of Mouth: Positive case studies can be shared by customers, acting as digital word of mouth to amplify the brand’s success stories.
• Adaptability: Case studies can be adapted for different marketing channels, offering versatility in their use.

Even with all of these similarities, Case Studies can feel stuffy (especially when they’re related to services). There’s one type that can come closer to UGC, and that’s the “Undercover Case Study.”

What is an “Undercover Case Study?”

This type of “case study” has been done for years, and was popularized by the show “Undercover Boss” which started airing in 2010. If you didn’t know… this was marketing (and was probably paid for by the company being featured). Here’s a few entertaining moments if you haven’t seen the show before:

Yes, there are a ton of cringy moments when the “boss” proves to be incredibly incompetent while working simple jobs, but the desired effect was usually achieved: humanizing big companies and their owners/managers.

It also provides a ton of exposure for the brand, what they sell, and why you should shop there (even if the only reason to shop there is to help the poor souls that work there).

You might be saying, “I don’t have millions to spend on a production like this, what can I do?”

Good news! Marketers are stepping up to show how this type of case study can be done without a million-dollar budget.

Undercover Billionaire: A Step Closer to Practical Undercover Case Studies

“Undercover Billionaire” is this American TV show where super successful business folks get stripped of everything and get plopped into small towns armed with just $100 and a car. They’ve got a tight 90 days to spin that measly $100 into a cool million-dollar business, all from scratch.

The show kicked off on August 6, 2019, and wrapped up its first season on September 24, 2019, featuring bigwig Glenn Stearns. Season two stepped up the game with three entrepreneurs, including the likes of Grant Cardone. Here’s a peak at the content:

Folks love this show for throwing the American dream into the ring and seeing if it’ll come out on top. Can you really build a booming business with just pocket change? Sure, the show’s taken a hit for maybe being a bit too scripted or over the top, but it’s dishing out some serious lessons on hustling and business building.

Here’s the rundown: these high rollers pick a business, build a squad, hustle their way from that humble $100, and BOOM – a startup is born. Oh, and there’s a Discovery Channel film crew shadowing them, calling it a documentary on starting a small business from scratch. They want you to think, “Hey, if these guys can do it, so can I!”

Yeah, we get it – reality shows can be a bit Hollywood, maybe stretching the truth here and there. But, “Undercover Billionaire” serves up some real-deal insights into the wild world of entrepreneurship and the crazy hurdles of starting a business from ground zero.

It also shows whether the marketing techniques touted by people like Grant Cardone ACTUALLY work.

Again, you might be saying, “This is great, but I still don’t have a budget for something like this.”

In that case, good news! Someone is making a show that could prove the practicality of undercover case studies for the rest of us!

Undercover Agency: The Future of Marketing?

We know you can produce a compelling, interesting undercover case study if you have the money for a big show and the ability to get huge names on it, but what if you have a smaller budget and a smaller following?

Enter our DigitalMarketer friend and community members, JC & Karen Hite from Hite Digital.

They’re gearing up to embark on a daring mission: launch an agency from scratch and try to acheive $10k in profits within just 4 months. To up the stakes even higher, they’re moving to Searcy, Arkansas (from their home in Nicaragua) to do it.

They want to prove that their marketing techniques, for both starting an agency and gaining results for their small business clients, works. To do that, they’re following these specs:

• No team
• 4 months
• $2k starting funds

To add an extra layer of challenge, JC is throwing in a commitment to keep faith and family at the forefront. That means reading the entire Bible during this experiment and powering down the phone from 5pm-8pm for some quality family time!

Can the Hite’s “Undercover Agency” show prove that undercover case studies are the future of marketing? We’ll find out!

If you’re an agency owner and want to join JC on this journey, they’ll be posting their progress starting in December 2023. To follow along, just join their Facebook Group.

The post “Undercover” Case Studies: Why the Future of Marketing Is Proving Yourself in the Field appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Artificial Intelligence is a game changer for marketing. While AI will be useful in many industries, the nature of the marketing profession makes it even more powerful, from the need for constant content generation, to ideation for advertising concepts, to automation for day-to-day operations, AI is the biggest innovation in marketing since the internet.

Since the beginning of 2023, the amount of AI tools for marketing has exploded.

While there’s no official count of new AI applications since the beginning of the year, if you monitor websites like TheresanAIforThat.com, you’ll find dozens to hundreds of new applications being added every day, with the current list including 4,600+ apps covering over 1,300 tasks.

Further, the investment in new AI companies has rapidly expanded. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), investments in AI software, hardware, and software for AI-centric systems will increase 26.9% to $154 billion in 2023 over 2022, with $300 billion expected by 2026 (SOURCE).

In 2021, the investment in AI doubled globally from less than $40 billion to almost $80 billion (SOURCE), and look what has come from that!

Needless to say, there are many, many choices when it comes to AI applications, and it can be difficult to nail down which ones to use, much less which ones you should focus on.

After discussing the topic for dozens of marketing professionals and AI experts, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: marketers should master ChatGPT BEFORE anything else.

Here I’ll explain why.

Why Marketers Need to Focus on AI Skill Development

Marketers are notorious for falling prey to “shiny object syndrome.” It’s no surprise why… the easiest person to get sold is a salesman after all!

There are always new methods, platforms, techniques, tricks, tips, and tools to make your marketing faster, better, and more effective. Every company needs marketing to succeed, and the impact of good marketing can make or break your organization.

AI is the shiniest object of all for marketers…

Here’s why AI is such a vital development in the marketing industry:

Ideation: Marketers and marketing agencies may have to create multiple concepts for content and advertising for each client every day. This need for volumes of creativity was time consuming and tiring, but with AI the process has become 10 times easier. No more lag time between needing to brainstorm and creating new concepts… AI makes it almost instant.

Volume Creation: In addition to massive amounts of new concepts and ideas, AI also provides the ability to create brand-specific content whenever necessary. By “training your AI” to create content based on a particular style, marketers can create new advertising copy, landing page headlines and text, email drip campaigns, social media descriptions, lead magnet materials, and much more 10 times faster than before.

Personalization: With AI, marketers unlock the power of personalized experiences on a large scale. By leveraging data analysis and machine learning, AI comprehends individual preferences, behaviors, and purchase patterns. Marketers can then tailor their messaging, recommendations, and offers to each customer, creating engaging interactions that drive conversions.

Data-driven Insights: AI’s ability to swiftly and accurately process vast amounts of data empowers marketers with valuable insights. They can delve into customer behavior, market trends, and campaign performance. AI-driven analytics tools offer actionable recommendations based on data, enabling marketers to make informed decisions and optimize strategies for superior outcomes.

Customer Support & Chatbots: AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants provide instant and personalized customer support. They excel at handling customer inquiries, offering product recommendations, and facilitating purchase decisions. Available 24/7, AI chatbots enhance response times and boost customer satisfaction by delivering prompt and relevant assistance.

Predictive Analytics: AI algorithms leverage historical data to predict future outcomes, empowering marketers to anticipate customer needs and behavior. Predictive analytics aids in optimizing marketing campaigns, identifying high-value customers, and forecasting sales trends. With these insights, marketers can allocate resources effectively and enhance overall campaign performance.

Automation & Efficiency: By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, AI liberates marketers to focus on strategic endeavors. AI-powered tools automate email marketing, social media scheduling, content generation, and data analysis. This streamlined automation boosts efficiency, productivity, and eliminates manual effort.

Competitive Advantage: Marketers gain a competitive edge by harnessing the potential of AI. AI-powered tools enable advanced market research, competitor analysis, and trend forecasting. By staying ahead of industry developments, marketers can make proactive decisions that differentiate their brand and seize opportunities for success.

With all that said, you will severely limit your ability to use AI if you bounce around from application to application. That’s why you need to get focused.

Why You Need to Limit the Amount of AI Applications You Use

While AI may be new to the marketing profession, the need to focus on a particular set of skills has been around since the dawn of the position.

Skills like copywriting, product positioning, data analysis, customer service, communication, networking, adaptability, and innovation are keystones to the professional marketer.

The ability to utilize AI is just the latest one.

I’ve found that the principle of minimalism allows for the quickest development of new skills. Unfortunately, trying to learn how to use a dozen new tools goes against this philosophy… you need to limit the number of new applications if you really want to master one.

Here’s why the principle of minimalism applies to AI skill development:

Intentionality: In the world of minimalism, intentionality reigns supreme. It urges individuals to deliberate and question whether they truly require an array of specialized tools or if a single tool can serve their needs just as well. By consciously evaluating the functionality and purpose of each tool, you can make mindful decisions that align with their specific requirements.

Simplification: Minimalism champions the art of simplification, both in life and possessions. By minimizing the number of tools and opting for multi-functional alternatives, you can declutter your tool collection, streamline their workflow, and eliminate unnecessary complexities. Embracing simplicity allows for a more efficient and unencumbered approach.

Functionality over Excess: Minimalism urges us to prioritize functionality above all else. Instead of amassing an abundance of tools for each specific task, the focus shifts towards identifying a versatile tool that can effectively serve multiple purposes. By valuing functionality over excessive accumulation, minimalism fosters efficiency and resourcefulness in our endeavors.

Mindful Consumption: At the heart of minimalism lies the principle of mindful consumption. Rather than succumbing to impulsive or societal pressures, minimalism encourages you to consciously evaluate your needs. By carefully considering the necessity of each tool and making choices aligned with those needs, we reduce excessive consumption and wastefulness. Mindful consumption promotes a more intentional and sustainable way of living.

With all that said, there’s many reasons why ChatGPT is the marketers-choice for AI skill development.

Why Marketers Should Focus on ChatGPT

Yes, there are newer and more specific AI tools out there, but ChatGPT is still the standard when it comes to marketing, and for good reason.

The following is just a few of the reasons why the use of ChatGPT should be a primary focus of marketers.

Conversational Superpower

ChatGPT possesses unparalleled conversational superpowers that elevate customer engagement to new heights. With its natural language processing capabilities, ChatGPT can simulate human-like interactions, leading to more personalized and meaningful conversations with customers.

Marketers can harness this power to provide tailored recommendations, answer queries promptly, and build strong connections that foster brand loyalty.

Further, marketing is one of the few areas of business where a conversational style is more effective than technical communication styles, making ChatGPT ideal for this type of content generation.

Versatile Marketing Applications

ChatGPT’s versatility empowers marketers to excel across multiple marketing applications. Whether it’s content creation, customer support, lead generation, or even social media management, ChatGPT delivers exceptional performance.

Marketers can leverage ChatGPT to generate engaging blog posts, automate personalized email campaigns, and handle customer inquiries efficiently—all from a single AI tool.

Better yet, as marketers utilize ChatGPT they’ll start to define their prompting style, creating more and more content from less prompts.

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Standardized Brand Voice for Unlimited Companies

With ChatGPT as their exclusive AI tool, marketers gain a profound advantage in crafting hyper-targeted campaigns that utilize a consistent brand voice.

ChatGPT’s ability to understand individual preferences, behaviors, and purchase patterns allows for laser-focused messaging. Marketers can tailor their content and offers to resonate with each customer on a deeper level, resulting in improved engagement, higher conversions, and increased ROI.

Since marketers often focus on more than one company or client at a time, ChatGPT allows for continuous content development through individual chats that maintain the organization’s brand voice without the need for a technical account set up each time. It doesn’t care how many clients you take care of, meaning both cost and time savings.

Continuous Learning & Improvement

ChatGPT’s continuous learning capabilities enable marketers to stay ahead of the curve. Through ongoing training and exposure to real-world data, ChatGPT adapts and evolves to meet changing customer needs and industry dynamics.

Marketers can capitalize on this adaptive learning to refine their strategies, optimize campaign performance, and drive continuous improvement.

Dependable Development & Longevity

Few, if any, companies have spent more money or received more investment than OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in the company to date (SOURCE), and with a valuation of $29 billion, OpenAI won’t be disappearing any time soon.

Further, with over 100 million users and an expected revenue of $1 billion by 2024, the company is strong and growing (SOURCE). If any company will lead the way in consolidating smaller companies with similar solutions, it’s this one.

How to Develop Your ChatGPT Marketing Skills

ChatGPT is like a hammer. In the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, it can still be useful, but in the hands of a carpenter, it becomes something transformative.

That’s why the second cohort of DigitalMarketer’s AI-Powered Marketer Accelerator is focused exclusively on ChatGPT. If you want to learn how to employ the most powerful frameworks built by DigitalMarketer over the last dozen years, while also using AI to make the process faster than ever, you need to attend.

The post Why ChatGPT is the Best Tool for Marketers appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

AI is an opportunity, not a threat. The marketers who embrace change will see their capabilities expand faster than they ever thought possible. Marketers who hide or ignore the trends will be left behind.

There are two ways to look at this situation. Let’s start with the negative way…

The Lost Marketers on the Beach

All the marketers sat on a beautiful beach that went on far as the eye could see. They chatted, laughed, built sand castles, and played in the waves. Then the ocean started to recede; a little bit at first, but as the minutes ticked by, it got farther and farther away from the shore until it couldn’t be seen.

The marketers looked at each other perplexed… some thought it was funny and ran out onto the wet sand where the waves used to crash. Others remained were they were, and simply discussed the troubling disappearance of the ocean. Still others ran inland towards high ground, screaming for the rest to follow.

By the time the tsunami could be seen, it was too late for anyone to change their mind. The wave rose, and rose, and rose, and it got closer, and closer, and closer. It swept up the people who had run towards the ocean first, then the people who did nothing, and then pursued the ones who tried to prepare for its arrival.

Everything they had built on the beach was destroyed. Most of the marketers were lost, sucked into the ocean or smashed against the shore. The remainder stumbled across a desolate landscape, picking up the pieces of what they had built, and began reconstructing from scratch.

I’m sure you guessed that AI is the tsunami, and the three groups of marketers are the ones that are happy about AI but aren’t taking it seriously, the ones on the beach aren’t doing anything, and the ones heading for the hills understand that AI is a game changer and are starting to prepare.

The good news is, this isn’t the only way to look at this situation!

The Adventurous Marketers on the Frontier

The crew was ready. Cargo stowed, flight checklist reviewed, engines in the green… the countdown had begun. The count reached zero and like a match being struck, the ship leapt into the air climbing higher and higher, faster and faster until the mountains and waves devolved into a mat of green and blue, and the clouds billowed below.

They were headed towards space, where countless new stations had been constructed near resource-rich astroids… or maybe to the manufacturing plants on the moon… or to the growing colony on Mars… or to explore the moons of Jupiter. The crew was excited with the endless possibilities this new frontier had opened up.

There would be danger and fear, but that would be easily squashed by adventure and opportunity, driven by courage, energy, and a ravenous appetite for advancement.

The frontier had been opened to everyone, and once that happened, the crew realized that the environment they had been operating in had become stale, monotonous, tedious, and boring. The frontier had saved them.

Which story do you identify with? Which one sounds like more fun?

Survival is stressful. Adventure is stressful. The difference is that you can choose adventure, while survival is just something we all have to do.

Your Marketing Career is Safe If You Want It to Be

I speak to a lot of well-established, successful marketers who have been in marketing for over 20 years. That puts them in a unique set of people who saw the transition from traditional offline marketing to digital marketing… the biggest change in the industry since the television.

They’re NOT worried. All they can see is possibility. Possibility for more effective marketing, for more efficient teams and workflows, for expanding markets in new industries, and for tech that makes they themselves 10 times more productive.

If you choose to view AI as an opportunity, you will have the right mindset for what’s coming next.

What’s coming next? A shift in the way we do things! It’s something we’ve faced before and will face again. That said, you still need several traditional marketing skills to succeed in the new age.

Here are 5 ways to safeguard your marketing career.

#1: Double Down on Marketing Strategy

With AI tools increasing the productivity of marketing managers, and allowing all marketers to produce content faster than ever while also managing paid media channels more effectively, the marketer that can produce the best overall strategy will win.

Note that I said “overall strategy” and not “paid media strategy,” “social media strategy,” “content strategy,” “product strategy,” etc. With marketers’ growing capabilities comes the opportunity (and necessity) of creating a cohesive strategic plan that can be created and executed by a single marketer.

At DigitalMarketer, we have the Customer Value Journey to guide overall strategy creation. It’s an 8-stage process that will turn strangers into buyers into active promoters, and you can incorporate all elements of marketing (AI, email marketing, social media marketing, copywriting, etc.) into it.

TAKE ACTION!

If you don’t have a well defined overall marketing strategy, you don’t need to create one from scratch. The Customer Value Journey has been used to make over $100 million for DigitalMarketer and billions for our students. Download this ebook and start solidifying your strategy today.

#2: Start Using AI

No, you can’t avoid using AI tools.

If you think that you can eventually hire an “AI Specialist” just like you do with a “TikTok Specialist” because you want to avoid the platform, you are 100% wrong here. You need to build a basic understanding of how AI works so you can evolve your strategy to match.

Your ability to both use and understand AI will directly impact your ability to manage marketing campaigns. Without a basic understanding, you won’t just SEEM out of date, you will be truly lost, and that will be very noticeable by your subordinates, colleagues, superiors, and clients.

TAKE ACTION!

Not using AI yet? Not to worry! Simply set up a ChatGPT account RIGHT NOW. Next, whenever you’re planning on doing a Google search for something, instead put the same search into ChatGPT. Review the answer and ask follow up questions to refine the result. This is the FIRST STEP to understanding AI and what it’s capable of.

#3: Ensure That You Understand All Marketing Methods

Do you still need to understand each marketing method if AI could potentially execute it for you? Of course you do. How could you manage anything you don’t really understand? You can’t!

Could you manage a group of doctors if you have no medical experience? How about mechanics if you’ve never fixed a car? All managers in skilled workforces have typically done the job in some way, shape, or form in the past. Marketers are no different.

At DigitalMarketer we call it the T-Shaped Marketer. A T-Shaped Marketer is somebody who has expertise in about 1-3 main marketing facets.

Being a T-shaped marketer means that you can help clients with their marketing strategy from A-Z. While you’ll have your bread and butter (like SEO, social media, paid ads, or community building), you’ll be able to create winning strategies amongst other marketing facets by collaborating with your marketing team.

While AI might ultimately replace some of the marketing specialities, your understanding of what role the method played will be pivotal to your advancement as AI becomes increasingly widespread.

TAKE ACTION!

Do a self-assessment, and find out where your marketing skills are really lacking. Here are the marketing skills that we promote at DigitalMarketer. Copy the list, then give yourself a 1 to 10 score regarding your knowledge and understanding of each one. If you give yourself a 5 or less on any of them, start researching, or take a course to learn more.

• Digital Advertising
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Search Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Copywriting
• Ecommerce Marketing
• Analytics & Data
• Community Management
• Optimization & Testing

#4: Add Style & Creativity to Your Skillsets

AI isn’t magic… it’s just a new kind of program. You’ve used computers and programs for years, and you understand the limitations they have when it comes to new ideas, stylized content, and general creativity. It can only know what we know, so the best way to stay useful is to KNOW MORE.

How can you start to “know more?” You do more! You experience more. You open your mind to every possibility and identify and squash habits that prevent you from learning. This sounds simple, but it is far from it.

Hate to bring it up… but you know your aversion to using TikTok because “it’s for young people,” or “you don’t have time,” or “you’re too mature for the content?” STOP IT. That is a perfect case study of your tendency to limit growth because it’s uncomfortable and you fear change. ‘

Now that you’re open to learning, let’s talk about creativity. Who better to show you how to beat AI in creativity, than AI? Here’s what ChatGPT had to say on the subject:

So! According to AI, you can beat AI by leveraging your creativity to develop unique ideas, perspectives, and content by combining human intuition, experience, and creative thinking.

Let’s take it a step further by talking about style. If you can’t define your brand’s style in every aspect of the content they generate, then it doesn’t have a style.

Every piece of content you generate needs to have a unique and identifiable style that matches your brand. Every article, video, graphic, document, post, press release, event, physical location, website, etc. needs to look like “you.”

This is extremely important as more and more people generate more and more content using AI. If we all use the same tool to create content about the same subject, there will be no reason to go to one vendor over another. Your content needs to reflect you.

If you don’t consider yourself stylish or creative, stop it. You’re both of those things, you just need some practice.

TAKE ACTION!

Two tasks for you to do here… get creative and define your style. To get creative, set aside 15-30 minutes a day for creative exploration. This could be through artistic mediums like painting or drawing, but it could also be trying physical activities like yoga or weightlifting. The important part is that you try something NEW each week, every day.

For your personal style, open a document and define 3 unique aspects of the following (start with this personal list to really drive home the need for defining style in every aspect of your life):

• Your Writing Style
• Your Wardrobe
• Your Home
• Your Diet
• Your Hobbies

Don’t overthink it! Simply start to think about what makes you different from other people.

#5: Improve Your People Skills

AI isn’t people! We all know this. Just try to chat with a bot and you’ll quickly notice who’s a person and who isn’t.

There are dozens of facets of communication that we unconsciously execute every time we have a conversation. From body language to tone to mood to outside factors like the weather, time of day, and current events, a lot goes into how we converse with each other.

That isn’t likely to change soon, which means that your personal relationships with coworkers, managers, employees, customers, clients, and vendors will still require people skills.

“People skills” are more than just conversing as well. If you want to be a truly capable human, your skills will need to include emotional intelligence, empathy, adaptability, listening, openness, acceptance, authenticity, curiosity, clarity, patience, compassion, and an abundance of energy to make it all work.

That personal touch will be more important than ever as the more mundane tasks that used to suck up our energy and emotional reserves will be increasingly delegated to unfeeling machines (AI).

I think one directive sums up your new mindset well: BE INTERESTING.

Be interesting in your conversations. Be interesting in the way you approach projects. Be interesting when you talk to people you see every day. Be interesting to new people you meet.

TAKE ACTION!

For the next week take notes on any conversation that lasts more than 5 minutes. Note how interesting (or boring) the engagement was, and then consider how you could have made it more interesting. After a week, take one of your notes and apply it to your conversations for a day. See how the conversations go and adjust accordingly.

Conclusion: You’re Going to Be Fine

You don’t have be afraid of the coming changes, but you do need to be open and aware of them. Start using AI right now, and really start to think about what makes you special as a person.

If you want a huge leg-up, consider the AI-Powered Marketer course. We’re assembling a team of highly intelligent marketers who are embracing AI right now to enhance their results.

The post 5 Ways to Safeguard Your Marketing Career Against/With AI appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Marketing isn’t just for getting new clients.

Hiring is more than just filling a role or getting a job done; it’s about building a high-performance team that grows your business. Building your team at work isn’t much different than building a sports team–each player has a specific role, is motivated by different things, and needs different types of coaching and support.

Finding those ideal candidates is also no different than finding ideal prospects for your business. You can use the same strategies used to market your business to build a talent acquisition strategy.

Ideal Candidate Avatar

A baseball coach doesn’t choose a first baseman based on skill or positional requirements alone.

Yes, they need to know how to catch a ball, but they will also need to work well with the team, fit into the team culture, and be invested in helping the team win. 

Before drafting your job description and posting it on LinkedIn, take some time to build an ideal candidate avatar. You’ll understand your ideal candidate on a deeper level and can craft a compelling job description that attracts those ideal candidates. 

Candidate Value Journey

Finding ideal candidates is tough, but it’s even more challenging when you don’t have a strategy.

Much like we build a customer value journey to understand where and how to market to our ideal customers, you can use the customer value journey to create your strategy for talent acquisition. 

Most businesses hire reactively, but the companies that succeed at building high-performance teams create a proactive talent acquisition strategy.

This allows them to attract and retain high-performing talent and build roles around those ideal candidates instead of filling positions as they become available. 

Are You Delegating Tasks or Growing a Team?

One of the most common pieces of advice given to new business owners is to delegate tasks they don’t love and aren’t great at to a virtual assistant. Now, that’s not always bad advice, but for most new business owners, this is done rapidly without much forethought into their future business structure and growth. We must ask ourselves, am I delegating tasks or growing a team?

If you are or plan to grow a team, the tasks themselves matter less than finding an ideal team member who can adapt to the needs of the business.

Let’s go back to our baseball analogy. If you’re a one-person team, you may be better off finding a decent player invested in learning and growing into a position over time than you are finding a home-run hitter who can’t catch or throw and has no desire to learn or grow with your team. 

Instead of focusing solely on the tasks, you want to delegate, spend time considering your ideal future organizational structure and the types of team members you want to bring in and build the company around.

As they say, find the right people first, and you can eventually get them into the right position or create one for them. 

Growing a team is no easy task, but attracting ideal candidates is no different than marketing to prospective clients. Build brand awareness, engage, and qualify candidates, and select the right people to grow your business and accomplish your missing instead of building perfect roles that no one cares about. 

The post Marketing for Talent Acquisition: Ideal Candidate Avatar appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Did you know that misaligned teams can cost businesses trillions of dollars each year? Yes, you read that right.

When sales and marketing teams don’t work together cohesively, it’s sort of like having a pilot and a copilot that don’t communicate—it becomes difficult to accomplish goals and stay on the right course!

Although the key to well-aligned sales and marketing teams lies in communication, that’s not the only way to keep these two departments working together. 

Here are five ways to seamlessly align your sales and marketing teams in order to achieve business objectives.

1. Make a Plan Involving Both Teams

Roughly 48% of leaders spend less than a day on strategic planning for their projects. The trouble here is that with so little planning, it’s hard for companies to iron out the details and get both sales and marketing teams aligned. As a result, it’s difficult for teams to bring those plans to fruition. 

When you utilize strategic planning that involves both teams, you can drive success by:

• Creating a single vision that aligns your stakeholders and the entire company
• Justifying your reasoning and avoiding biases and flaws
• Tracking your brand’s progress because of shared and more specific goals

What should the plan constitute? More than a schedule of your upcoming marketing activities – it should also outline your future sales promotions. 

Planning should always be a two-way street, and communication is key. Both departments need to share their goals and benchmarks so that they can be on the same page.

One way to achieve this is to ensure your marketing team is up to date with how your sales team is performing and whether or not they’re meeting company goals. This can help show marketing if their strategies are actually working or if it’s time for adjustments.

2. Get Management Involved

A lack of upper management involvement can cause a whole slew of problems in your business, such as low productivity and getting past tough hurdles. To make sure your marketing and sales teams are successful, it’s crucial to have upper management of both teams working together. That way, both teams can complement each other’s goals: 

• The marketing team can look for potential leads to boost sales
• The sales team can help marketing understand buyer personas and adjust the team’s marketing campaigns
• Effective marketing strategies can also help cold leads become sure buyers

In addition, team members can get inspired watching their leaders work together cohesively. This can lead to better inter-team collaboration overall.

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3. Focus on Updates and Sharing Experiences

It’s a fact that the marketing team has a bunch of ideas the sales team don’t, and vice versa. This is where continued education becomes essential. In fact, you’ll be surprised at what sales and marketing can learn from each other. 

For instance, the sales team can first-hand teach marketing about what potential customers want in marketing campaigns. At the same time, they can also give insights into how customers respond to different approaches. They can provide statistics and reports to help optimize and improve the campaigns to achieve better results.

By showing which strategies lead to more sales, they can help the marketing team hone in on strategies that work, helping save time and resources.

On the other hand, the marketing team can teach sales about the importance of CRM through email marketing and creating upcoming scheduled content plans.

4. Optimize Your Outreach Channels

Utilizing the right outreach strategies can help improve your company’s inbound and outbound marketing. And in return, it can boost sales and achieve your business goals in no time. 

You should optimize your outreach channels by following this step-by-step framework:

• Determine who your target market is. Who are your buyer personas, and how can you address their needs?
• Always be engaging. There’s a reason why your company has sales representatives. They should be responsible for constantly being in touch with potential leads and checking for follow-ups.
• Prioritize how your target leads feel. Recognize their emotions and base your approach on that to win them over.

Sequencing automation tools, such as drip email campaigns is also important. And with proper automation, you can reach your potential customers at the right time.

5. Get the Right Tools

59% of marketers believe that technology has a huge impact on their marketing strategy. Hence, it’s essential that brands take advantage of these online tools to achieve their overall sales and marketing goals. 

Moreover, technology allows you to keep track of your company’s KPIs and metrics, such as new leads or first-time purchases, which could help both teams generate ways to improve and work on the strategies. 

Final Thoughts

Getting your marketing and sales teams to work together can be easier than you might think at first glance. By getting upper management on board and creating a joint plan, you can set the stage for successful teamwork. 

From there, focusing on good communication, strong supporting tools, and continued education of both teams is what will ultimately lead to well-aligned marketing and sales departments. 

Once these teams are aligned, you can start spenging less time micromanaging and more time focusing on a bigger picture for your business.

The post 5 Ways To Seamlessly Align Your Sales & Marketing Teams appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

FACTS: People buy from people – not businesses.

You’ve likely heard that phrase at some point in time but aren’t sure how to connect the dots. You may be telling yourself, “Of course, people buy from people…but, aren’t they really buying from a business?”

Technically, yes.

And…they buy because the person they’re buying from is someone they’ve grown to know, like and trust.

Did you know…

74% of all Americans say they are more likely to trust someone who has an established personal brand.

63% of Americans are more likely to buy from you if you have an established personal brand…and this goes for business owners and those in corporate leadership positions. (Brand Builders National Research Study, 2020)

When you combine messaging infused with your personality along with the exact strategies to help you communicate your brand to the people who want to buy from you … this is where the real magic happens.

So, how do you start to understand your unique communication style?

I use a tool called DiSC…and it’s a game changer.

I first used DiSC almost 20 years ago at a leadership event. I’ll never forget the feeling of, “Dang…I sure wish someone would’ve told me about this sooner.”

I learned that even though my dominant, get-it-done demeanor was highly productive, I was pissing off those around me because I was tough, decisive and not much of a collaborator.

After that DiSC session, I made some radical changes with how I managed my work, especially with my team. I learned to listen more. I learned the power of collaboration was so much more powerful than working in a silo…and it was fun too.

Related Articles

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 2

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 1

• Unlocking the Secrets to Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent in Your Agency

DiSC® is a personal assessment tool that helps improve communication, teamwork, and productivity. As a business owner, DiSC is critical for raising self-awareness and developing strong sales skills.

The more effective you are at examining the way you communicate and how that communication lands with your potential clients, the more cash you’ll see in the bank.

We all buy services and products based on emotional reasons. You buy because the brand makes you feel good about yourself…or you hire a service provider because you only want the best.

What if you could message to your perfect client in a way that would have that person begging to work with you because they felt so emotionally connected to you that it didn’t matter what the price tag was…they were ALL in. Would you do it?

You can spend thousands of dollars marketing your business, but if your message isn’t clearly connecting at a deep emotional level with your perfect client, those marketing dollars are wasted.

When you message to your perfect client, your messaging needs to be focused on them – not you. It’s natural to communicate to others based on how you want people to communicate to you.

However, let me push you to think about communication from this lens:

• How does your perfect client want to be communicated to?
• Do they need bullet points or a 25-page long PDF description?
• Do they like to talk about their personal life or keep it strictly business?

I’m not advocating you change who you are with your messaging. But, I highly recommend that if you’re a tell-it-how-it-is type like I was 20 years ago, you may need to consider how that communication style lands with your perfect client and maybe soften it up a bit.

What is the DiSC?

The DiSC is an acronym that stands for the four main personality profiles described in the DiSC model:

• (D)ominance,
• (i)nfluence
• (S)teadiness and
• (C)onscientiousness.

People with D personalities tend to be confident and place an emphasis on accomplishing bottom-line results.
People with i personalities tend to be more open and place an emphasis on relationships and influencing or persuading others.
People with S personalities tend to be dependable and place the emphasis on cooperation and sincerity.
People with C personalities tend to place the emphasis on quality, accuracy, expertise, and competency.

The best thing about DiSC is that not only will you learn so much about yourself, but you’ll learn how your type best communicates with other personality types too.

If you want to have the edge over everyone else in your industry, then you have got to really understand your unique communication style and how to utilize that in order to attract more clients and set yourself apart.

The post How to Communicate Like a Boss … Based on Your Personality Type appeared first on DigitalMarketer.