 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the first Marketing Club webinar of the 2022-2023 academic year. Today we'll be hearing from Daniel Riles on the latest trends in digital marketing. Daniel has been a keynote speaker at our flagship digital summit conferences since 2013 and presented many CIM webinars for us over the past few years. He is a marketing course director and also a fellow of CIM. He has over 25 years experience in digital marketing, is CEO of Target Internet and is an onboard winning author. He is also the voice of the Digital Marketing Podcast which is listed in the Top 10 iTunes Business Podcasts. So he really knows your stuff and it's an absolute pleasure to have him with us again for today's webinar. So before we get started with Daniel's presentation I'd just very quickly go over the format for today's session how you can get involved in the live Q&A and what the Marketing Club is. If you've watched any of our Marketing Club webinars before then you'll know how this works but essentially you'll be hearing from Daniel for around 45 minutes or then move into a 10 to 15 minute live Q&A session to answer some of your questions. If you registered for the webinar you'll be able to post your questions for the Q&A at any time during the session by clicking on the question mark. If you're watching on a laptop you'll find the question mark on the right hand side of your screen or on the top or bottom if watching on a tablet or smartphone. If you're watching us live on YouTube or Facebook and would like to take part in the Q&A's in future webinars you'll need to register for the session either via the CRM Events page or through our posts on the socials and watch via the GoToWebinar platform. Daniel has very kindly agreed for his slides to be available to download whilst we're broadcasting so if you'd like a copy just click on the handouts icon and you'll find them in there. If you want to watch the session again it'll be available on our YouTube channel so just head into the playlist section and find the Marketing Club folder. You'll find the entire back catalogue of our Marketing Club series to date and there too with sessions covering a broad range of marketing skills and personal skills, all free to access and available whenever you want. So I'll quickly explain what the Marketing Club is. The Marketing Club was created primarily to help students get the most from their CIM accredited degree and prepare them for a career in marketing. Although the Marketing Club is designed for students, CIM members and other marketing practices are also welcome to attend the sessions. The uninitiated CIM accredited degree program enables students to gain a professional marketing qualification by taking advantage of the exemptions the accredited degree provides. If you're a university student you can sign up there to receive the Marketing Club newsletter. Simply take a photo of the QR code you see on screen and that will take you straight through to the sign up page. Alternatively you can hop onto our website and find the Marketing Club page in the qualifications drop-down menu. Each edition of the newsletter will provide you with content designed to support your studies and actively manage your professional development by keeping up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. So it really is worth taking a look and signing up. We'll pop the QR code up again after Daniel's presentation so don't worry if you haven't had a chance to capture it yet. You may also be interested in our international student competition, The Pitch which is designed to recognize and reward the marketing talent of the future. Each year we task undergraduate marketing and business students in their second or third year of university with a real-life marketing challenge. This year's challenge has been set by leading global brand WeR8 and allows students to apply their learning from their degrees in teams of two or three. For more information about the competition visit our website using the QR code you can see on screen and don't forget to register your interest by the 2nd of December. If you'd like to share any thoughts about today's webinar on the socials you can use the hashtag CIMEvents. We'd love to see your comments, the good, the not so good and everything in between. So I'd now like to introduce our guest speaker Daniel Riles. If you'd like to turn your webcam on Daniel, I'll pass things over to you and the floor is yours when you're ready. Thank you very much indeed Phil. Good to see everyone here today. So we're going to take a look at the latest trends in digital marketing for 2022 and taking us into 2023. As Phil said, I'm Daniel Riles. I am CEO of Target Internet and we work with lots of the brands that you'll know helping them upskill their teams and essentially doing a lot of the stuff we're going to be doing today and showing them how to kind of use this stuff in practice. I'm also a program director at Imperial College. I'm one of some of my MSC students and as I said, I did a digital marketing podcast which is now the number one marketing podcast in most of the world which is great, which means we're beating people up McKinsey and so on. And what's interesting about that is that it costs almost nothing to create that podcast so I will touch on to that a little bit later on. I've written a few books. I'm not going to talk about those at all. I promise I want to get straight into the trends. In October, I was lucky enough to go over to Boston in the US and go to the HubSpot conference inbound 2022. And as well as speaking, I saw lots and lots of talks and it was an interesting kind of insight to where we are in digital marketing and we are at a bit of a turning point. There's a lot of things that are happening at the same time that are having a big impact on what we're going to do going forward so it's an interesting time to do a trends webinar. Now, one of the things that HubSpot launched at the event was their HubSpot community. If you want to take a look at this, it's community.hubspot.com and what's happening is that we've got a couple of things that are creating a bit of a perfect storm and making digital marketing a lot harder and those are things around privacy. So it's getting harder to get to people. Content burnout, we've got too much content and we're overwhelmed by it and therefore if we don't own the relationships of our target audiences we are going to have problems. Now you'll go through and see their example of how they've created a community. They've got discussion forums, they've got loads of resources, they've got groups of people that get together separately. Under the advocacy tab that you can see there they've actually got the HubSpot fans. They're such a popular platform that they've got a kind of fan group which is essentially a fan group for a piece of software. So it's interesting how they've managed to create this community and this passion around their product and that's by tying together live events, connecting people and making that much very human connection. So I wanted to start by talking about this content burnout and this community piece and then I'm going to privacy because that's going to be part of this and then we're going to get into artificial intelligence because that's having a huge impact on all of these. So it's an interesting time to be in digital marketing. So I always show you this whenever I do a presentation. This is internet live stats. It shows the amount of content that's been published so far today based on the time that zone that I'm in and the thing I would always point out and if you've been on my presentations before you would have seen this over 4 million blog posts written so far today that number is accelerating and the reason it's accelerating is one, there's more people doing content marketing but two, this artificial intelligence thing that I spoke about. It's now very, very easy to create content that even having to write anything yourself and I'll show you how in a moment I do a live demo of that as well. The amount of videos viewed on YouTube more than the search is done in Google. There's more and more content. Lots of it's using TikTok, Instagram reels, all those kind of things. So it's a noisy environment. It's been noisy for a long time though. So why is that a bigger challenge? Well it's getting faster. The level of content that's being created is getting bigger but actually that's starting to switch us off. We're getting this kind of burnout. So I thought I'll go to my Facebook this morning and I'll grab a screenshot of the kind of stuff that I'm seeing and why I'm not really using Facebook anymore. So I've gone through here and I've kind of did an estimate this morning about 60% of the content I'm seeing is now nothing to do with my friends, nothing to do with my family, nothing to do with what I'm connected to but is now recommended content. So you can see here there's a sponsored post trying to give me a standing desk of which I already own a standing desk. On the right hand side of the page there's a couple of ads showing up and then I've got reels showing up and a lot of the stuff that we're seeing reels are trying to be a bit like TikTok. It started with just wait for it and they did not expect this. That really kind of click baity type stuff. Now it does work because Intree makes us click on things but I didn't really sign up to Facebook for this kind of stuff. So the algorithms behind these platforms are having a huge impact on how people are using these channels. Now those of you that are active TikTok users will probably realize that the first impression you get of TikTok, people dancing to music is not really what you get when you've been using the platform for a while and you start to go down the rabbit hole of the algorithm really understanding you. However what we're seeing in Facebook is that I'm getting a lot of stuff that I don't really feel is relevant and actually isn't really why I was on the platform in the first place. So we're seeing this kind of fragmentation between platforms but we're also seeing as marketers we need to stay up to date to what's having an impact on the algorithms. So in reality it's very hard now on any of the meta platforms so in Facebook or in Instagram to actually be able to get something to kind of go viral to make it really grow and get there without doing fairly sensationalist content. Whereas actually on TikTok and then LinkedIn actually as well it's possible to still do that. So with these algorithms we've got what the platforms tell us is important but we can also see how they're shifting. So for example at the moment in LinkedIn if your post gets lots of comments that has a big impact on the algorithm and you tend to get a lot more visibility of that content. So understanding and staying up to date of these algorithms becomes really important but remember there's a knock on impact. So here's my little tip, practical tip. For example if you go to LinkedIn and you do a post and you design it so it gets loads of comments it gets loads of engagement. There's a window afterwards if you post some other content that content will get better reach because the algorithm has said this account is really doing things we're going to make that content more visible. So I would always go through and try and say right I'm going to do this piece of content purposefully to try and really engage the algorithm in this case with getting loads of comments and then I'm going to pay something maybe some video content afterwards that probably won't get as many comments but that will help it get more visibility. So we need to kind of stay up to date on these algorithms and I'll show you some places to look at it. One person that's great at this by the way is Neil Patel.com Sorry to speak recently it was a really insightful talk but basically he will publish on his website NeilPatel.com loads of things about how the algorithms are changing and how you can really get the most from those as well. Universally video content short form video content is working in everything from Twitter, LinkedIn and obviously in Reels and within TikTok as well so definitely worth looking at that. So how do we build this community? Well the problem is it used to be that you would go through to Facebook for example you'd start a group or you might have a LinkedIn group the problem is that within Facebook some people don't really want to use Facebook anymore and you can get a lot of negative stuff potentially happening in those groups. With LinkedIn groups it was that they just get bombarded with spam and not that many people really actively engage. So interestingly we looked at the digital marketing podcast and the podcast being a very broadcast channel and said how can we build engagement? So what we will now do is we'll create that podcast we will make sure it's in the places where those people want it so it will be on all the podcasting channels Google, Apple, Spotify and so on but also we now do a video version we've only just really recently started doing this because we read a lot of people were consuming that content from YouTube and we didn't just want to post up the audio and just have some graphics in the background so we've done a full we've really gone into it from a video point of view now as well to build community off the back of it. Well interestingly we've gone down the email route that might sound a bit strange because email is kind of fairly broadcast what we've said is if you are a fan of the podcast then if you sign up for the newsletter we'll send this newsletter that will never have any sales and never have any ads in it it's purely going to share useful stuff but also if you reply to it we will go through and we will come directly into my inbox the team and myself will deal with it and we'll respond to you and then what we've done is changed the format of the podcast to have someone on the podcast who's Louise in this case who is there to be the voice of the customer she's there to take people's questions to answer and pose those questions to challenge us on what we're saying so very much making the ownership of that broadcast stuff that we're doing being kind of part of that community as well so thinking about the content format so we went from a two person discussion podcast to a three person podcast with one person being the audience and being there to ask questions I don't really understand that what do you mean by that and kind of playing dumb on the topic to help make sure that everybody understands stuff to bring in the questions that the audience might bring in now the email that we send out is nothing particularly special you can see it's not particularly heavily designed or anything else but it's three tips, tools or techniques no sales, no ads and if you respond to it we will respond to you now your average click-through rate on an email the open rate is about 20 to 22% and the click-through rate is about 2.5% on average now if we look at what we're getting for this we're getting a 46% I mean this is very, very early on this is when there's only a couple of thousand people on the list there's tens of thousands of people now and the click-through rate would be 2% is 24% so it kind of shows that actually email can be a very social channel if you pitch it right and you don't use it to try and sell and you're using it to kind of drive engagement so thinking about what can you do that might drive community what can you do that's a little bit different because you want to try and own that relationship and you want to try and build up advocacy rather than just thinking about influencers we're going to try and go through and try and think about advocates and it's that idea you might have heard from before a thousand true fans, you can get a thousand true fans a thousand people that really care about your stuff and engage with you that will really amplify things and what the team at HubSpot was saying is that if I talk to ten thousand people that's ten thousand possible conversations whereas actually if ten thousand people are speaking to each other it amplifies things hugely from that point of view so that can make a real difference so trying to get through this there's too much content how can I cut through that and I will come back to content in a little while but how can I cut through that noise well what I really want is actual human engagement we've been about that for a long time but we're really having to do this properly now so thinking about how you might do that now this brings me into these AI tools because we've seen an explosion of this recently and if you haven't seen some of these things grab the slides and take a look at them afterwards this is where it all seemed to come together last week suddenly online there was this podcast and this was a podcast proposing to be Joe Rogan a very famous US podcast a slightly controversial interviewing Steve Jobs now as I understand it I don't think these two people ever met each other or if they did they didn't actually do this interview this interview was done completely by AI but not only were the voices simulated to sound like Joe Rogan and sound like Steve Jobs the script was created by an AI as well in their tone of voice now if you listen to it we're getting into this kind of uncanny valley of not really being able to work this is real this is not real now if you listen to it for long enough it doesn't completely sensible but it's incredible how quickly this has moved forwards and the reason for that is that there are increasingly AI platforms open source AI platforms or paid for platforms that other people can utilize so you can utilize a platform that will simulate it will learn someone's voice I'll talk about that ones that will write before you can deal with a lot of things about writing we've got others that do art now and these are becoming really widely available so let's delve into that a little bit so for example if you go google generated faces there is a website you go in you say I want a face of somebody that is a particular gender a particular age a particular ethnicity and it will generate faces where you can change the background color all sorts of different things as well these are useful for marketing purposes but unfortunately being used for things like fake LinkedIn profiles so when you look at these it's very very hard to tell a difference I've told the story before but I was doing a course in this case we were doing a course for the curated government the engineering sector and I showed this particular screenshot and on the right hand side the second one down the guy that was watching said oh that's a picture of my cousin I said that isn't your cousin he said no no that's definitely my cousin this conversation went on for a little while and it looked almost identical to his cousin but this person doesn't exist we worked out a hairline was slightly different and a few other things as well but we're starting to get into some quite strange territory because in digital marketing we're getting access to these tools before anyone else we're starting to see these tools appear so let's take a look at some others that are quite interesting Google is doing this now with image recognition so you can now search with an image so if I take a photo of myself or if I take a photo of someone I'm walking past in the street I can upload that you can see the little image search photo button at the top and it will search and say who do I think this is now I've taken quite a common image of me here and dragged it down and says this is Daniel Rolls here is books this is what he does so that's great it's recognized who I am but the AI is learning and sadly I did this another time with a different photo and I searched upload this image which is a senior citizen which is slightly insulting but there you go we're all getting slightly older so these AIs are learning and they're kind of shifting and changing and even Google is using them within their search algorithms to try and improve the quality of things to recognize images and so on as well I obviously look like all of those slightly bald men at the bottom of the page there as well so there you go these are the things that happen to us as we get older so there's some really interesting tools this one I've mentioned before but I thought it's worth coming back to because it's changed this is Descript.com and I will give you a toolkit at the end by the way that lists every single one of these tools and websites and you'll have my contact details for reaching out if you can't find anything Descript allows you to take audio and video and automatically transcribe it which is really useful not 100% accurate but pretty good but you can then edit the audio by editing the transcription so I can cut a piece out and it will cut it out of the audio and seam it together if I've interviewed someone and they um a lot there is a button that takes them all out of the audio it's absolutely brilliant the interesting thing about this is it's got 5 automated voices so I could actually do a podcast on my own I could get the automated voice that has typed something in and it will say it one of these AI voices and it's really good inclination and so on it as well but the strange thing about it is if it's got enough of my recording of my voice it will learn my voice and I can type something in select Daniel 2 and it will say it in my voice and it's got better the more and more of my voice it's got the better and better it's got over a period of time so I can already um with the tool and by the way we've got some links for some free trials of these tools in the toolkit that I'll send you afterwards but I can deep fake myself but I can also deep fake anyone that I've got a lot of their audio recording so already we can't believe anything we hear recording of a politician or a celebrity saying something if it's just audio we can't believe it necessarily we'll be at that video stage soon as well so big shifts these tools becoming available to us this is interesting and this is one that we've been playing around with a lot recently this is Jasper and this is one of those these natural language processing tools that I was talking about so I've gone in here and I've literally all I've done on the left hand side I've got title PDCA model which is the Deming Cycle it's a marketing model PDCA model is the content description I've said I want the tone of voice to be professional I've hit go and it's written this forward and it says the PDCA model also knows the Deming Cycle is a continuous improvement strategy used in business and industry involves planning a change or action implementing the plan check and see if it's successful and then making adjustments based on the results I regularly repeat it's right it's correct and what it's done it's using all the websites the Google stuff it's copied from somewhere but it's learned and it's then gone through and written this there's also then in this a button that allows me to go and check this exact text doesn't exist anywhere else so it hasn't you know because there is a chance that it could go through use AI to generate something it could be exactly what someone else has written and it will do that it's called a plagiarism checker it'll make sure that it doesn't do that the worrying thing about this is that I could go through and use this I could just grab someone else's copy put it in select a paragraph and say rewrite it and it will rewrite it slightly differently so there are some opportunities of plagiarism please do not use any tools like this if you're doing any CI assignments or anything else like that they're really useful from a writing point of view because it can help stimulate your thinking your structure it can get you going I use these tools when I'm trying to plan out structure for blog posts and things like that but what it means is the barrier to creating content is disappearing so already I can literally type a few prompts in and it will write something for me I'll come back to that then I could use a tool like Descript put it in and get it read out in an automated voice so I'd have a podcast of that and then I can go through and I could use one of these kind of tools this is Jasper as well it does image generation so I've literally just typed in the word here artificial intelligence into an artificial intelligence generator and it's generated these four images for me they're not great but actually if you play around with this there's loads of settings that you can use what style you want what particular materials the art looks like and so on and I'm able to go through and generate images that are created by AI and therefore this is not copyright I can use this now we discussed this on a recent podcast interview there will be tools very very soon and they're already kind of there type of phrase in it will write a blog post for me it will then go through and automatically create a voice a podcast of that maybe automatically publish that for me and within the blog post it will also generate an image that's completely unique to that podcast if it's now that easy to do these things there will be a lot of content being published most of it will be rubbish I mean most of it won't be great and that's the kind of thing here you can use these tools as an aid to give you some structure and so on but a lot of people are just going to be pumping out content low value content now that connects us up the Google algorithm we're going to talk about it in a moment in terms of content and search engine optimization is trying to really heavily differentiate content from valuable content and they're changing their algorithm to do that because they can see this is happening and they don't want people to write things for the search engines we should be writing things for our target audience now why this explosion of these tools Open AI is a platform and it provides GPT-3 that's the thing that does the natural language processing it does the writing it does the sentiment analysis all those kind of things and then Dali Dali here is something that generates art and it's relatively new but it's getting better all the time so now these tools are available loads of people are using them very badly a lot of the writing tools are terrible Jasper is actually very good if you want to use Jasper there's a link in the toolkit that will give you a 14 day trial and I think 10,000 free words so you can use it for trying out and see the kind of different things that you can do with it it's got lots of models and frameworks in there that you can kind of play around with this is moving pretty quickly which means that we've been bombarded with content already so we're kind of switching off to that there's going to be more content and we need us or we can use these tools for blasting content out and we really don't want to do that as well but it changes things it means that as marketers we need different skills we need to better use these tools effectively to get the most out of them so we're using them better than everyone else that's had a knock on impact as well and I'll come to why in a moment but already we're seeing artificial intelligence in the Google platforms so I've gone in here to create a Google ad but in this case I haven't gone in and said here's my headline here's my text, here's my image that's the ad running in front of this group of people instead here I've gone in, I've put my URL in a load of images, a load of logos, a load of videos I've done five headlines five descriptions, five calls to action and then Google takes those and mixes them all up differently does multivariate testing and says this headline with this image with this call to action in YouTube, Gmail, Google search Google Display Network which is two and a half million websites that show Google ads and Discover which is the Google app and I basically just put all this stuff in let it run and the AI is going to work out this is the best ad to show to these people that's a real shift it's good because it's going to optimize my ads the right places to get the most engagement it's not good because I lose control of my brand slightly I don't know what image they can use with what heading so I might shift in how we're doing things and for those brands that want very, very tight control of their brands this is probably not ideal but for those of us who just want to optimize campaigns now just to give you an example a good Google paid search ad might get a 1% click through rate average a great one might get 5% on a Google text ad we've been using this the equivalent of this on text ads and we're getting an 18% click through rate advantage because there aren't that many people doing this at the moment and there the algorithm isn't having to compete too much against itself but this move to AI this bombardment with content means that we're using AI to optimize what people are seeing to create the right content so it's a real shift this is the perfect storm I'm talking about all these things kind of happening at once so let's move on and move into privacy because this is connected as well so a couple of things have happened first of all, app tracking when Apple started saying privacy that's what we're about and every app you went to install it says do you want to allow this app to track your activity across other companies apps and websites is worded in such a way to make you think no thanks and you go no I don't want that we think that that's cost Facebook or it will cost Facebook about 10 billion dollars in ad revenue because they're not able to micro target they used to be for this reason and for others as well so you've got people like Facebook really struggling because they're not going to have the data they used to have because devices are now starting to block access to all this data they used to build profiles on us so they would know what we'd done, what we'd looked at what we were doing in other apps, what we were doing in different websites and we were able to go through and say okay based on that, I know you're interested in this it was great for marketers not so great from a privacy point of view so this is disappearing then we've had the whole third party cookie piece and this confuses a few people so bear with me if you understand this but if you go to a website say it's a news website, we'll call it site one and I'm reading the news and there's an ad on the page and that's from the advertiser a cookie is set on my machine to remember who I am and that cookie is not by the site it's not the first party cookie it's not by the advertiser it's by the second party it's actually by the advertising network the third party and in many cases that third party is the Google display network or what browsers are saying is that I didn't really ask for this I did opt into it but I didn't really actively know that I'd opted into it so some of the browsers are going through and they're blocking these third party cookies which basically means that you can't go through and track these kind of cookies so it means there's going to be less people able to track in such a precise way so at the moment Safari is blocking them Google have come out and they've said look we're going to go through and block these cookies as well but they're not going to do it about another year and a half why is that? well it gives them the opportunity to go through and to use machine learning to learn from the cookies they're getting in the moment and then replace that with machine learning instead of party cookies we won't have such precise targeting but it means the machine learning that's out there will be able to target these things a lot more effectively as well and we're seeing this already so if I go through and I set up a Google ads campaign and you can see here I've got to the targeting section and it has said okay set your targeting and it used to be at this point I would go in and I would say I want people that are in this particular region of this particular type and that are interested in X, Y or Z and it would target those people now it just says do you want automatic targeting we think it'll be 20% more effective if you use automatic targeting so this move towards privacy has meant that people that sell advertising Facebook, Google, those kind of people have to do things differently and they're using machine learning solutions which is part of artificial intelligence to be able to do that as marketers what does that mean we won't have the same targeting options we'll have to learn how to make best use out of this so for example when you set a Google campaign you are able to go through and essentially give it some signals to say these are the type of people that I want to target and it will start to help the AI on its way to learn about who the right audiences are who you want to show your content to as well so we've got bombardment with content we need to move to community a little bit more we've got lots of AI tools coming in but that overlaps with this whole privacy piece as well where the advertising platforms are moving to AI based solutions as well from that point of view I would really advise marketers to learn a little bit about artificial intelligence and I don't mean you need to understand the technicalities of it but understanding what's machine learning what's pattern recognition how does that fit into AI overall what are other people doing with it it's worth looking at some of the things that IBM have done with Watson if you haven't looked at project debater which is IBM creating artificial intelligence that can actually debate with people and create an argument and then think about what would be applications of that how could I easily say go through and look at those things but it is radically changing our market the next five years are going to be a pretty exciting ride in marketing in terms of the amount of change that we're going to see and these different things kind of being part of that now as I just said you can take a look at this if you go to Google add settings all that third party cookie data I was talking about and first party and I explain in a moment is in one place so you can see you know Google is first party what you've searched for in Google what you've done in YouTube what you've done in that apps like Google Maps because that's first party because you're on their website but they've also got all that third party data from those two and a half million websites that show Google ads and that's all built together to make a profile of you my demographic, my agenda what websites I've looked at recently what languages I speak it will tell you all the things I've shown an interest in where I've physically been what I've watched in YouTube all those things and that's the profile they've got but they're not going to have that anymore so they are using that however at the moment to help train this machine learning in an anonymous way so that's how they're building and that's why it's probably going to be a year, year and a half before they move to these new solutions because bear in mind that's how they make a lot of their money still by selling targeted ads but take a look at your ad settings and see what things it thinks about you and knows about you in there as well and that leads us into one of the last couple of sections which is content and SEO challenges because of all this there's more and more noise there's more content, there's AI generated content being created and is out there as well so SEO has become slightly more complex so search engine optimization getting to the top of Google but Google's algorithm the better it is, the more advanced it is the less you kind of need to worry about it because what Google want is for you to be able to do a search in Google and get really good results so if we write content that is for our target audience and they love it and they engage with it that's going to tick the box for the algorithm but how does Google know if we love content let's go through and look at that there are thousands of aspects of the algorithm these are the ones that Google tell us about and we know from experimentation that clearly have a big impact on page optimization, very simply have we got the words on our pages that people are searching for because that would be an obvious thing to Google you search this, it's on the page related phrases are on the page it looks like it's on the right topic so you're going to go through the rules to go through and understand look I know what people are searching for I've got those words on the page, that's great link building is still part of this because links from other websites are still a signal that this content must be valuable because why would another website link to this content would it have to be useful or entertaining or educational so for someone to link through to this value in that so it's still part of the algorithm it's harder to get links because there's so much content to bother linking through to your stuff it must be pretty special so we need to create special content social signals people talking about your stuff people don't talk about and link through to your content unless there's something useful in it so again that's a part, it's a small part of the algorithm but it is part of the algorithm in there the big one, the important one and the one that's really grown is user behavior and actually Core Web Vitals is part of that and that's do people click on your content in the search results or do they click on other results when they get through to your content how long are they staying on it are they scrolling are they actually engaging with that content people get your website, stay for a few seconds and leave, that's a terrible signal for Google because it shows they can't really they didn't engage with the content and find it useful but Google's algorithm is becoming much more advanced about this trying to differentiate, now bear in mind they've got data from Google Chrome, if you're using Google Chrome which a lot of us have are using GA4 well GA4 is really allowing Google and us to not only see people got to a web page but actually are they scrolling so Google Analytics 4, the latest iteration of Google Analytics which we're going to talk about in a moment so that used behavior that's where you should be focusing get the words on the page but create something that's so valuable people are going to stay there and engage with it and use it and Core Web Vitals, well it's some technical factors that basically try and judge by showing your content as well so what do we need to do well we need to think about the fact that we need to create really valuable content you've got hygiene content it's the stuff that describes our products and services needs to be really optimized to have the right words and really be the best description of what we do hub content is the stuff we publish all the time it's the stuff that goes out in our blog posts and so on, great but hero content is that content that makes people come to our website month in month out because it's really showing up in the search engines as well I want every piece of hub content I create to end up being hero content and I can do that by following all the rules of SEO but also never just go right to get a blog post done, get it out, get it out I need to create content that is really differentiated and is valuable and this is this kind of test we did with this so does it really matter people staying on your web pages for longer we went through we tested it, we created a lot of blog posts we already had but we created videos for them and those videos increase the dwell time on these pages so basically people come through and there's a video, about a third of us end up watching a bit of the video, it means you stay on the page for longer and what we saw is the rankings for all of those pages the dwell time went up and the rankings went up as well so Google is really looking at this as a factor are people actually staying on your pages and engaging, scrolling, playing videos all those kind of things when I look at my analytics we can see that this particular blog post was driving just under 3,000 visits a month on its own but almost all of those 2,671 were coming from Google so yes we had created this content we socialized it, we tweeted and Facebooked and linked in all those different things but then Google had said hmm, it's got the right words on the page people are linking to it, they're talking about it and they're staying on the page and therefore we started to build up those organic rankings, so the content goes from hub content to then hero content because it's showing up in the search engines and every month it's driving traffic so our approach to the content needs to take this, now this is the original video from Rand Fishkin Rand, he's a bit moz, he now runs SparkToro, another digital marketing talk for this idea of 10x content 10x content is you go off and say, if I'm going to create content what's the topic, okay we're going to do something on writing page titles for example I'm going to go out there and I'm going to find the best content about page titles I'm going to do some load of research and find what I think is the best content on that topic, not just what's at the top of Google but the best stuff that's out there and then I'm going to try and do something that's 10x better now, that's hard okay, so we need to gain insights first of all, what's out there then how am I going to make this 10x better, what's going to make it unique is it that I just do it for a particular you know, instead of going page titles I go page titles for dentists and you go really specific or what about a beautiful interactive version or 100 great examples what is it in the format, in the presentation the content that I can differentiate this piece of content and that means, rather than doing 5 blog posts, I'm going to do one that's amazing I'm going to take that time and I'm going to concentrate on something and do something pretty exception that will have an impact on SEO it gets people staying in your content more it gets people linking through to it it gets people talking about it and it does all of those things for SEO it does all of the things for our target audience it differentiates us from AI created content and it actually gives people gives us the opportunity to build an audience for the community from so it's so important that we don't just go into content I think, right, I'm going to just knock out a few blog posts whatever it might be if I'm doing a podcast and I do it and I don't edit it particularly well the sound quality is not great there's not a narrative to it the video is pretty dodgy quality it's just not going to stand out so we have to always try and be a little bit more exceptional than what other people are doing the last thing I wanted to come back to before I just give you some pointers some resources and we do some questions is GA4 current version of Universal Analytics so it is Universal Analytics or GA3 everyone calls it Universal Analytics most people are using it it will cease to work or it will cease to record data as of the end of July next year so everyone is having to move to GA4 a couple of problems first of all getting it set up properly is really difficult so first of all the whole of GA4 works and we call events events are people loading pages scrolling they're clicking, they're doing search results submitting forms, starting films downloading PDF GA4 is much better at understanding what you're doing within pages not just loading pages but I'm going to want to set up some specific events that are specific to me or making a purchase or maybe filling in a particular form so I can then turn those into what's called conversion events so a conversion event is saying this event is the most important one to me I want to really track that one and work out how people got that to set that up you are either going to be very very adapt in Google Tag Manager which is quite a technical tool or you're going to need to get your developer to do this for you most people are going to agencies that have got some experience in this and they are using their agency to go through and to do this work for them because it's quite technical out of the box it will collect quite a lot but we've got this set up so start doing this now one of the big challenges is you get it recording something it takes 24 hours when it shows up so if you've got problems unless you're using the clever debug modes it's not an easy thing to set up in the first place so that's the first barrier the basic set up, get it on your website is relatively easy these custom events and these these conversion events getting those right so I'll give you some resources for learning this hugely important skill at the moment really can differentiate if you're good at this stuff then you go well I'm used to universe analytics, I've got all these amazing reports and you go into GA4 and you're like where is stuff you haven't got that many reports and when you click on them for example if I went through to this one which is looking at all the pages on my website and it used to be in Google Analytics 3, you could click on these pages and it would drill down and give you more data I can't click on anything here so it's quite a different interface what I need to do is go to the search box search for that page the page title and then I can add with a little plus that's down there on the page an extra field I'm sure they're going to change this, I'm sure going to make this a more a useful user experience but it's pretty limited at the moment now we are expecting that to change we're expecting a product to develop very quickly but it's people going to think I've set it up wrong because I can't find anything and it's because it's not there really you have to use it a different way but actually there's a steep learning curve on the menu you'll see you've got this custom reports tab it's the one in the middle, the blue on the left hand side it gives you some options to start from but I can build a report into anything and I can display it in any way that I want so actually GA4 gives you a huge amount more flexibility but the learning curve is much, much steeper I've gone through and created a user journey so I can say about people landing on my podcast page where do they go next where do they go after that and I can drill into their journey and start understanding how people are moving through my website I can start looking at the funnels where people are dropping out of my buying process so it is massively more powerful but it's a much steeper learning curve and it's harder it's harder to set up properly and there will be a lot of people who are set up not properly so make sure you're aware of that this is my favourite place for learning this is analytics mania and this chap here has managed to get in very early and do loads of really great training content he hasn't paid for courses but actually there's loads of really good free stuff in here the two that are probably worth looking at is the Google Analytics 4 for beginners that's really, really worth looking at as well and there's a one hour course which is a really nice one and then there's some longer ones and then there's a Google Tag Manager tutorial so that's worth looking at and the stuff that you can see for event tracking so great skill to have if you're a student and you're looking to go into work what a great set of skills to have but also all of us as practitioners we need this stuff as well even if we're not doing it even if we need to ask the right questions of other people we're going to need to make sure we've looked at this so what are my tips focus on owning the relationship with the audience don't always rely on ads and ad targeting how can we build a community what might that look like how can I really engage the people and build those people that are truly engaged now if HubSpot can do it for as a SaaS, software as a solution business anyone can do it we just need to really try and engage and build that community where Opportunity is doing that but always, what I always say is take a step back focus on the user journey target audience is using it and they're there to consume the type of content that you're planning on sharing should you do podcasts only if it fits into your target audience's journey so always thinking about whether it's see, think, do care race from Dave Chaffee a very traditional sales and marketing funnel what content does your target audience want at each of these different stages and what channel are they going to consume it in and then we can fit the right content into the right channel so always take that step back who's my target audience what does their journey look like and if you know who your audience is what content they need to each stage the journey and what channel it should be in you have the makings of a strategy that's the approach that we need to take to cut through this noise to provide value to our audience to avoid getting drowned out and that AI created content and to be able to actually build a community give people the stuff that they really want now there is a skills crisis and that has been for some time within digital marketing we do something in partnership with the Charter Institute marketing called the digital marketing skills benchmark I'll give the link in the moment you can benchmark your own skills you can benchmark your team for free if you've got a team as well but the point is you don't need to be 100% you don't need to be on the outer edge of this ring you just need to be better than the competition the problem is that we're not great analytics and data at the moment so we're doing loads of content and we're not even measuring it so it's a kind of problem from that point of view so let's kind of go through and think about how we might improve our skills and essentially what it is that we need to learn to differentiate ourselves from this and how we can kind of go through and improve us so I just want to give you some resources to finish up before we move into the kind of Q and A of things as well I'm just going to say my earphones out because they just died so alright first of all you have got the digital marketing toolkit if you google digital marketing toolkit you will get all the websites that I've mentioned and some free trials and things like that so just google digital marketing toolkit it will be number one in google you can download that if you want to benchmark yourself or your team targetinternet.com for the skills and you can benchmark yourself your team download the full report no email required as well from that newsletter I mentioned podcast and all the video related to that it's podcast if you'd like to connect up with me and discuss any of this in the future on LinkedIn it is just Daniel Rolls on Twitter it's at Daniel Rolls and on Instagram it's at Target Internet but that is me and I'm very happy to connect to you on any of those platforms as well so I'll leave that on the screen just for a few moments before we move on to the next slide but I think we're going to move on to questions now as well so Phil are there any questions? Yes indeed thanks very much Daniel that was fascinating and actually quite scary in parts I think we do have a few questions so we're now going to head into the Q&A as you've already said but please do continue to post your questions for Daniel and we'll try and get through as many as you can in the next 10 minutes or so and just a little reminder for those watching via Facebook or YouTube today that if you want to take part in future Q&As you'll need to register on for the webinars through the CIM events page or social posts and join via the go-to webinar platform okay Daniel first question is around GA4 actually do I really need to learn GA4 and what should I look out for? Right so the first thing is that most organisations like 82% of organisations that use analytics have Google analytics they've got two choices they can either stop next July recording data they can scrap Google analytics and move to something else that something else could be Adobe which is payable to or Fathom analytics is a new one that's worth taking a look at so quite a few people are moving that way but otherwise if you're going to stick with Google analytics which most people kind of want to and I'll give you a reason why it's important you're going to have to move to GA4 so therefore learning it really a central skill for marketers one of the reasons we need to learn it that's YouTube ads paid search ads all of those things the way they now work is you go in and set your objective and the first thing it says is okay you're setting this objective because we're going to probably use machine learning for targeting we're going to use your analytics and what your goals are or your conversion events in analytics to optimise your campaign so it's basically do stuff and it's going to keep on your analytics and it's going to say are you getting more of things, lead generation whatever is it you set your goals up as so if you don't use GA4 you're actually potentially, if you're using the Google ad platforms at a disadvantage so we want to make sure that using GA4 if we're going to use Google ads and things like that because it will have an impact so yes it is kind of important from that point of view but also I would suggest that it's just a really important skill from a marketing point of view because so many people are using it not many people have got it at the moment so I'd really recommend that yeah go for it get that set of skills that the Google stuff itself so they've got their skill shop so if you just Google skill shop there is now some GA4 stuff in there it's only just appeared but that YouTube channel that I mentioned is probably the best one that's out there I'm at the moment we are doing some stuff on the podcast of this as well so if you just Google digital marketing podcast you'll find the stuff with that so grudgingly it is an essential skill that people are going to need okay just one more question on the GA4 actually do you think GA4 reports will replace data studio it's an interesting question so your Google data studio just what people know is something that allows you to take data and visualise it in different ways they've now changed it to looker data studio because they've combined another tool and the tool they've combined was basically if you're familiar with power BI it was a data visualisation tool and what they're doing is they're taking data studio making it a more advanced data visualisation tool but there's a lot of things that you can now do within GA4 that you could never do before without extracting the data and taking it somewhere else so to some extent yes you can also bring data into GA4 from other platforms like other ad platforms so you couldn't really do that before so there are some things it will do but they seem to be expending data studio it could be YouTube but it could also be Facebook so I think they'll make data studio more advanced at looker studio but there is a lot of stuff that GA4 can do that it couldn't do before thanks Daniel just returning to your start of the presentation when you're talking about AI so the question is if the rate of deep fakes are increasingly worrying why then would a marketer be trusted for relationships or a community well that's the problem is that as there are more deep fakes there will be less and less trust and people will be more suspicious of content, they'll be suspicious of brands so actually investing in community now is a really important thing to do because we need to build that trust so when people don't believe in anything we go do you know what I'm going to go to my trusted sources and this has already happened to some extent because we know fake news, political manipulation all those things that have happened in the last five years actually we now go to our trusted sources now if I'm going to read the news I will go to one of three websites that I know that I trust and I know they're impartial I at least know their political leanings and so on as well so actually what's interesting we don't talk about brand very much in digital marketing which we should do but brand becomes more and more important investing in brand becomes more important in these kind of challenging times because if I say I trust that brand I'm going to listen to what they're saying why we do the podcast is that people listen to us, we don't try and sell people anything at all in the podcast and then people go do you know what I trust those people I need someone to upskill my team I'll get them to it so it's that brand investment via content so it's a challenge and the question actually kind of showed what the challenge is which is that people are entrusted and therefore they need to cut through that by being detrusted source, by building that authority and by building a community of people that are kind of like minded to cut through that Continuing the theme with the increasing focus on AI machine learning etc potentially distract from the creativity marketers need to continue showing could it widen that skills gap I think it well if usually tools well they can help with creativity so having the skill to use them effectively but the problem is it's going to be very easy to use these tools and not be particularly clever with them and just pump stuff out so I think actually if we go back to what advertising was like 50 years ago coming up with an incredible concept that really resonates with people that kind of stuff still becomes even more important AIs aren't going to crack I mean eventually they will but at the moment they're not so we think them at the moment they are augmentation tools they're not automation tools so that they will help us do a better job they're not going to take away what we're doing hopefully if we use them as automation tools we'll publish a lot of rubbish but if we use them for augmentation it should improve what we're doing but I think that means there's even more space for good creative because that's what's going to differentiate and I think if we can differentiate then that's going to cut through it's always been we see a thousand TV ads but one or two would stand out same thing so it's happening online now it's been kind of commoditized so we need to try and cut through that okay so still hope again similar theme how can we spot AI content are there any red flags are there any are there currently any regulations surrounding us or are there going to be there are no regulations but I mean you can't you can't misrepresent someone so there are laws already that say these things you know I can't misrepresent someone I can do something for parody so there's already grey lines between that I would challenge you and we've done this already in our podcast we've taken me out and replaced me a sentence with the AI and seen this very long notice and no one's noticed and we're talking like 80,000 listeners to the podcast we've asked people to spot an AI sentence and they get the sentence wrong they think I'm me speaking as an AI sometimes which doesn't say a lot of how I speak but it's getting harder eventually I would challenge you I will write something with Jasper the AI and I'll write something the tone might be different but you wouldn't necessarily know it was written by an AI it can be really good quality content that's the problem and the more advanced the AI's get the harder this gets to do from that point of view within audio and video there are flags what's interesting and even within written copies sometimes but humans won't at the moment we copy you and I probably won't notice but with video and audio we probably just about can still but what we're doing is we're now creating AI to recognize AI content so I can run a piece of written content through an AI and it will detect for me if it thinks it's been written by an AI with video and audio that's a lot easier so we are going to see AI being the problem and AI being the solution in some cases but we can't put the genie back in the bottle it's out there and it's a really big disruptive moment for marketing and for society as a whole so it's interesting and it's going to be some challenging times ahead we've got loads and loads of questions actually Daniel I think we've only got time probably for another two or three apologies if we haven't had the opportunity to ask your question what are your top three tips on how to organically develop a new community so the first thing you need to do is you need to be able to provide some value to that community so they would want to engage you in the first place so we were looking at our content strategy and you know we were writing content and other people were writing content and it was quite hard to cut through that so we thought what can we do differently so that's when we went down the podcast road because we thought well there's not that many podcasts about digital marketing and there's certainly not many that aren't in American accents and aren't very commercial so that's our way into the audience so first of all five way into the audience then provide some value to them then we have to give them a reason to communicate with us because otherwise it's kind of broadcast so then we would give away things then if you want something extra sign up for this give us your email address could be join a social platform whatever it might be so give them a reason to take that step so you've got to make it as frictionless as possible don't let it get in the way so you probably in most cases don't want a separate login on your website for a forum for example because I'm already on Facebook I'm already on LinkedIn I don't want to do that but it could work if you provide enough value so you've got to provide value give them a reason to kind of get engaged with you and then you need to do something that gets the community speaking to each other and engaging with each other that could be a discussion forum but that could equally be having something they can vote on together so give them the opportunity to vote and use that vote to decide what your next piece of content is for example we need that two-way communication but it's not just about us having two-way communication it's about the community speaking and engaging with each other as well and that's when you kind of hit critical mass because that's when it starts to exponentially grow and you have that and that could be just conversations in LinkedIn with in LinkedIn posts and encouraging debate amongst people taking content and saying okay this person asked this question that's what our next video is going to be about so you actually you have to manage that and encourage it and enable it and if you can do that that's when it starts to really hit critical mass. Okay great. I think it's going to have to be our last question. There are obviously a number of undergraduates viewing the webinar today so the question is would you talk about what areas of digital marketing you have studied? See I studied my studies originally were computer science and computer engineering so I came into this really technical route and what happened with me I just fell into marketing when it became digital back in the Dark Ages there was no digital marketing. So that was the lucky bit for me so I think understanding some of the technical aspects how web servers work, how to build web pages all that can be really useful. Not that I'm a developer anymore but I can tell my developers what to do and I can guide them and ask the right question so I think that's an important area to kind of think about. I think that all marketers should study strategy marketing strategy, marketing theory so the traditional aspects of marketing because there'll be loads of people with tactical channel knowledge but they won't have the channel knowledge and the strategic stuff and then you are going to need the tactical knowledge understand how TikTok works, not just how you use it but how does the advertising work, how does that fit into a user journey and I would say analytics and measurement is where it's at that's the opportunity to really get more from your marketing so and if I wanted to if I was starting off my career now and I wanted to differentiate myself I would say you've got tech skills that can differentiate a marketer I could go through and have analytics skills but creativity, creative skills as well and then the strategy side of things so if you can cover off a few of those bases that's going to help you differentiate rather than just having you know I've got my CIM level 6, I've got my degree doing some of this stuff in practice is really going to help and I would say build some stuff, get it out there, test it that's really worth looking at if you're not particularly technical just as a last hint, look at some of the no code websites and tools like Bubble that allow you to build stuff without any coding because it will actually teach you the structure of how things work without having to need to code and you can build things and test them out so I think there's some key areas to look at that's great, some fabulous advice there thank you very much Daniel unfortunately that's all the time we got for Q&As for today again I'd like to thank Daniel again for that fantastic presentation and we do hope you've enjoyed the session and found it interesting and worthwhile we'll be sending out a short survey about today's webinar and we'd love to hear your feedback, it will only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous so please do let us know your thoughts on the session and what you'd like to see from our Marketing Club series in the future we'll be back with our next Marketing Club webinar on Wednesday the 16th of November, again at our new time of 1pm for that session we'll be joined by James George, you'll find further details listed on the events page on our website where you'll also be able to register for the session so that just leaves me to say a final thank you for joining us today take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again soon