 Good afternoon everybody and welcome back to our Marketing Club webinar series, the first one of the 2023-2024 academic year. We've got a great session today with Daniel Rawls who will guide you through the latest trends in digital marketing. Daniel has presented many CI events and webinars over the past few years so it's an absolute pleasure to have him with us again for today's session. So without further delay I'd like to introduce our guest speaker for today's session Daniel Rawls. If you'd like to turn your webcam on Daniel, I'll pass this over to you and the floor is yours when you're ready. All right welcome everyone, very good introduction, thank you very much for appreciating that and let's get into it. Let me start by introducing myself and explain what we're going to be talking about today. So we're going to talk latest trends in digital marketing. I'm Daniel Rawls, I run a company called Target Internet, Target Internet works in very close partnership with the Chartered Industry Marketing. We do things like provide the digital marketing learning, I teach on behalf of the CIM and together we are working with lots and lots of clients as you can see on the page here helping them upskill their teams around digital marketing. So what I'm going to try and do today is talk about some of the trends and the challenges all of these organizations and lots of others are facing. As well as running Target Internet I'm also a program director at Imperial College where I head up digital transformation, digital marketing and data science and I do a lot of teaching within executive education which is where we teach companies within the MBA programs and these are some of my lovely previous MSc students as well. As well as that I also do something called the digital marketing podcast which I know at least a few of you listen to. I'll highlight this as well as a weekly podcast also done as a video where we interview lots of people and just give you regular updates on what's happening in the world of digital marketing and I've also written a few topics, a few books on the topic which sadly for a few of you or course texts that you're going to have to read but for the rest of you we won't mention these books again I promise. So what I want to do is go through some key trends and it's a really interesting time to be doing this just because there is so much changing at the moment which makes things somewhat challenging for marketers and for students and for entrepreneurs but actually it's a really interesting time and there's lots of opportunity for interesting things and we have to start really with artificial intelligence because it's what everyone's talking about at the moment but it actually has a knock-on impact on loads of other areas within digital marketing as well. So if we kind of start with the basics a little bit. So there's been AI around within digital marketing for quite a time and GPT the thing that chat GPT is based on has actually been around for a while but the chat interface is what really has kind of brought it to the forefront and if you think about you know what we take for granted now the worldwide web the internet as we generally refer to it the reality is the internet was around for a long time but the web became a thing when we got the interface just like the GPT became a thing when we got the interface the GPT and what we really find in the chat GPT is there is a set of skills in their own right for actually writing prompts for it as well. Now I'm sure most of you have kind of played around with this already as well but a little tip with this there is an extension for Google Chrome called keywords everywhere now I always like to give lots of takeaways within my sessions so at the end of this to try and persuade you to stay to the end are lots of links where you can download lots of the things that I'm going to mention in the session today so I'll highlight those at the end but there's this great extension Google Chrome called keywords everywhere and it does lots of really good things for keyword research and for content research so it'd be really useful for any digital marketing activity you're doing but what it's also really great for is helping you write prompts for chat GPT so if you've got the Chrome extension installed you launch up chat GPT paid for free version and down on the bottom left you're going to have this little K symbol you can click on you click on that and it will give you loads of options and what I've done here is I put marketing writing and then I picked a marketing writing model and this is the BAB model which is the before after bridge model and it's quite often used in writing advertising and it's given me an instruction I just fill in the theme so if I read this out she says please ignore all previous instructions because otherwise it will refer back to what it's speaking about previously please respond only in the English language because it's learning Spanish at the moment so there's some strange things were going on you're an expert copywriter so getting it to role play that speaks and writes fluent English do not self-reference because otherwise it will refer back things it says previously do not explain what you're doing because otherwise it will tell you what it's doing as it's doing it and then write a witty because I've given you a tone of voice BAB before after bridge marketing campaign four and I have to put the topic in here for the sake of this I put puppies and then it does the before so meet Frank used to come home to a long day at work or to an empty house and then it's got the after now Frank's greeted with an explosion of tail wag sloppy kisses and boundless love and then the bridge want to experience this canine infuse transformation introducing positively yours what was interesting with this is how to go being witty with the positively yours brand name it's use the bridge and it's actually quite nice copy and the difference between getting some great copy out of this and not so great is the way that we're writing prompt so as a set of skills when we're recruiting marketers now we're looking for people we don't mind people using AI tools but we want to know they can prompt them effectively so I certainly would say learning that as a as a set of skills and experimenting with it becomes really important so that that's the kind of starting point the reality of this is that things are shifted pretty quickly as well so it was originally chat upt trained on data up to 2021 so you couldn't get it to look things up it didn't know anything about what had happened after that point now I've got access to a number of different features you'll notice a lot of them say beta in order to see these features you need to go to your settings in chat upt and turn on beta features so the ones that probably most interesting plugins plugins will allow you to do lots of different things you can switch on three plugins at a time and it allows to look things up online it will allow you to create charts to create pdf documents to go and analyze a pdf document a course text or something go on those lines you could you could do lots of interesting things without data analysis is really interesting because it would do a lot of data science analysis that previously you would have probably now had to have known how to use something like power bi really effectively or even more likely known a little bit python coding um to be able to do these things and now you can do this and I'll give an example of that at the moment and we've also uh in here got access to dali 3 dali 3 being the new version of open ai who created chattps their image generation tool there are other image generation tools like mid journey and various others out there but I'll show you why this is quite interesting so not only have we got chattpt we need to learn to prompt but actually as a marketer now I'm having to stay up to date with all these quick changes because if I don't I'm at a disadvantage for other marketers because they're going to better create content more quickly they're going to create images easily they can better analyze data create charts graphs maybe look at their customer data analyze which these customers are likely to churn so there's a lot of quite advanced things that would have taken a long time before that are getting quicker and this is only happening more and more quickly for the advanced users out there that are already using this stuff there is a developer conference coming up uh for open ai keep on out for what they're announcing about ai agents um if you're not familiar ai agents is when an ai you can go off and use various different agents so you could use chattpt but you could use other ai's as well but you can put them into sequences and loops and what that basically means is that you'll be able to get them to create a task list and then go through that task list and start creating and completing those tasks because moving very quickly really important to try and stay up to date with these things as well just to show you how advanced dali's kind of moved on one of the big problems with these ai tools was one they couldn't do text properly so you tell them to put a word in and it would basically go through and just put some like hieroglyphics looking kind of text in they're also really bad with hands and with faces sometimes it's quite ghoulish what they would create dali 3 gets over all of those problems so i've gone in here and said create a book cover for a children's book uh in a particular style uh and call it the adventures of eddie and water i have two beagles they are called eddie and water and the top left image is uncanny how much it actually looks like them obviously without the the pith helmet um but you can see the the the ability now to include text in things well from a marketing point of view that's really important if i want to do a heading uh for a blog post or if i want to go through and create a social media image now much easier to do that kind of stuff as well but not only are we getting this within things like chat gbt tools like canva which is a graphics editing package online allows you to edit movies those kind of things as well is actually now also having lots of ai tools built in so you can ask it to create an image but also you give it a theme you give it some descriptions and it will create lots of marketing assets for you all in one go so streamlining what we're doing the thing is because everyone's got this it's very easy to use it in an average way so if you're going to use it that skill of prompting becomes more important because you still need your content uh to really stand out from that point of view as well uh yeah so look out in bookshop soon i think i might actually write this book some point as well um if we're going through as well look at this data analysis piece what i've done here is take us in data um this is from a very academic website so this is the uk ecology and a hydrology website so it's all about collecting data from our rivers from our farmland from our forests and all those kind of things and then making that data available to people so they can look at things that will improve farming that will be good for sustainability uh will go through will stop river pollution all those kind of different things the problem is very often that data is in a set that's very hard for your your kind of average person to access and all i've done here is go through this website and i've downloaded loaded data on how many ash trees there are across the uk and where they are and i've just downloaded this massive data set um and i don't know anything about the data and i've just gone up and i've uploaded it into chat upt and i said analyze this data that's literally the instruction i've given it it goes in it was a zip file so it says well first of all we're going to unzip the zip file great inside that there are four files i think this is the one with the data looking at the columns i think this is what's in each of the columns based on this i'm going to go in and analyze these things is that okay i was like yeah that sounds good this is right let's analyze this i'm not sure i understand this i'm going to check something else and it kind of just goes through a conversation with you and then says okay how do you want to track chat down i said well why don't you do a 3d distribution of where these are and then it's gone through and it's basically said to me based on the longitude and latitude of the map of the uk uh how many ash trees there are in any particular location and it kind of correlates to where forests are and things like that but we can also start to look at the impacts of environmental factors and so on so this is going to be really really important for making data science accessible to a broader range of people great for topic like sustainability but actually as marketers we get loads of data we might have a load of data in our crm our customer relationship management system we can export that as maybe a you know a text file of some description what i can now do is upload that into chat in particular analyze this for me without needing those kind of data science skills so just playing around with this is is really worthwhile um and the fact you can upload files even if it's a zip file it can be really powerful for doing this so moving pretty quickly but worth having a play around even if you're not having any interest in data science the problem with all this is it's creating more noise we already as marketers had this hugely noisy environment this is a screenshot from a website was called internet lifestats and what this was trying to show me is you know what's happened so far online and the the reality of this is that we've just got huge amounts of blog posts millions and millions huge amounts of videos being uploaded etc etc and the reality is that cutting through this noise has got increasingly difficult and now that there's AI generated content that's got even harder because there's more blog posts and there's more videos of what it means is if you're going to create content there is no point doing it unless it is exceptional because it just won't cut through this level of noise so yes content marketing is really important and i'm going to come back to content marketing skills in a bit but the reality is we need to get better and better at this and there's an interesting point that was made i went to the HubSpot conference inbound in september in boston the us and everyone was talking AI to the point it became a bit of a joke where people were counting how many words in each presenter said the word AI but what was interesting is people said well this isn't you know this isn't fair we're having to compete with AI's now and the point that google made was no you're just competing with other marketers that are using AI so if you're not you're potentially at a disadvantage so it's like i give you some kind of examples so we can use chat gpt what we've also got here is a brilliant tool called jasper jasper is a kind of writing interface that lives on top of gpt there is a free trial of this that's in the toolkit i'll give you at the end so i think you get ten thousand words for free um so you can play around with this if you want to the nice things about this it makes it really easy that you can teach your brand tone of voice so i can say right this is our tone of voice i can point it at some content that we've already done and it will try and learn what the brand tone of voice is from that but i can also tell it facts this is the company name these are the key members of staff this is what we do this is where we're based this is the podcast that we do and so on so it knows facts about the organization it's got the right tone of voice and then i can ask it to write in the appropriate tone and it can include appropriate facts about my product services team members those sorts of things as well some ethical challenges with this as well so say i say to i was teaching undergrad class and i said can you go and write me something about the pdca model plan do check act like an it's a risk model very very easy now anything like that just to go in here type in pdca model select professional tone of voice and it's written out here uh the pdca model also known as a deming cycle is a continuous improvement strategy using business industry it and it's nicely written it's a definition it probably do a pretty good job of this the challenge here for me as a lecturer if i put my lecturers out for a moment is i don't know if you use chat gp to write this the reality is as well what i can do is i can select a paragraph of this in the top right there's a little recycle button hit rewrite and it will rewrite it and it's undetectable where it came from well i can also then it's highlight it hit plagiarism check and it will do a plagiarism check to see if that exists anywhere online so there's some ethical questions starting to come out from this is that acceptable you need to check by the way of your institutions if you are uh use any academic institution if you're allowed to use these tools or not i would say the skill of learning to write really well should come first and then we can start to use these tools just like we do mental arithmetic before we start using a calculator to make this quicker as well so great tools the problem is that the kindle store is full of books that have been stolen by the people's books rewritten in the tool like this and then published as a new book it's pretty much undetectable at the moment we've been doing some research at imperial college into that as well but jasper brilliant tool as a marketer they've now got a campaign build up which is a lot of fun you go in give it a title give it a really descriptive brief and select what you want i want a blog a press release five instagram posts whatever it might be and it will write the whole lot for you in seconds which can really start to streamline some of your processes but if you do it badly it will be average and it really won't get the traction potentially either now ai agents i mentioned you this is what you're going to see more of in the near future so and i'll show you where they are now and where they're moving to so i've gone into this one and i've said plan a marketing strategy to promote jersey in the channel islands because that's where i live i'm not actually there today i'm in in london today uh to attract tourists with a high level of disposable income stage one developer task list and i want you then to iterate okay so it goes off and it does stage one that i asked it to do and it says developer task list so the agent goes off and does that and at the moment it's using gpt and it says well i've created a task list so it says step one gather data on potential target markets demographic disposable income geographic location so quite a good starting point build my persona basically research current marketing program so what else is going on already established goals and objectives always need to start with that spell up a budget and it goes on and it kind of gives you all the standard things you would really hope for in a marketing plan but then because it's an agent it goes right i'll go off and i'll look at task one and then i'll do task one now what used to happen it used to say right i will research customer preferences and behaviors related to travel and tourism in the channel islands by collecting and analyzing data from relevant market surveys focus groups and interviews that sounds good but the problem was it told you what it was going to do but it wasn't then able to do it the reality now is because we have plugins and extensions and web lookup it's able to do those things so i've just i've just done it here and it's used two plugins it's used a warfarin plugin which is quite good for doing data analysis and it's used a plugin called world news to look at latest trends and i've asked it in this case to create a persona for a digital marketing manager including average salary frustrations in regards to their career and what they want and it's told me the u.s average salary the uk average salary told me its responsibilities but the frustration is really interesting keeping up the latest trends in digital marketing proving a return on investment these are all things i know that marketers struggle with so he's done it really well so when you combine gpt is in chat gpt dali for creating images you've got lots of other ai's being created and then you can use this kind of agent model to iterate through loops of tasks starts to get quite interesting because you say correct me marketing strategy give it a good brief it'll go up look up relevant data create it create a pdf document for you grab an image generate an image for the persona and so on so what we need to make sure as marketers is that we keep our skills very up to date because some of the things we're doing now will disappear or we'll just need to know really has it done a good job do i know enough about the topic to know that was a good list of a strategy plan in the first place because if you don't you're going to create rubbish using these tools potentially so keep an eye out of this agent stuff it's getting really interesting and it's moving really really quickly at the moment as well that moves us on quite nicely into this kind of topic around data and trust and the two things are quite closely connected but we'll get into them more broadly as well so let's try and talk about a particular topic uh first which is ga for google analytics for okay if you have the skill to use ga4 really effectively it's hugely in demand so what if you're not familiar what happened in july of this year the old version of google analytics stopped collecting data and they've been telling people for a year you need to move right to ga4 the problem was that ga4 nobody really understood it it's not as easy to set up as the previous analytics and it's certainly not as intuitive to use the reason they had to move it forward is the way they were collecting data was deemed as inappropriate or illegal in a few EU countries but also they stopped collecting as much cookie data because of browsers blocking cookies and phones blocking cookies i'll talk about cookies a bit more in a moment so they find themselves in a situation where that they have to google has to move to this new version as quickly as possible but what a lot of people didn't realize is that the previous version universal analytics actually had a lot of limitations anyway so forgive me some context so say i arrive on a website on page a and i'm there for five seconds then i move to page b and i'm there for five minutes which is 300 seconds what's the average page visit duration but what we might do is take a mean average which is say well we'll add the two together 300 plus five that'll give me 305 seconds i divide it and half and i come up with 150 two and a half seconds that's not what universal analytics did because the problem with universal analytics all it knew is when you arrived on a page that you viewed that page so it knew when i arrived on page a it knew when i'd arrive on page b it could tell how long i was on page a but it's deducting one time from the other because there was no page c i had no idea how long i was on that page which meant page b was actually counted as zero which means the last page you're on never counted which is kind of nonsense because very often the last page we're on is the page we're on the longest so actually what your analytics would have told you is that the average page visit duration was five seconds which is clearly nonsense so ga4 solves this problem and many others because it now knows what's happening within pages it knows if you're scrolling and how far you scroll it knows if you're playing videos as standard youtube videos but you can track other types as well if you download a pdf if you've clicked on a link onto a third party website if you have started to fill a form and if you completed that form if you did an internal search all of this is stuff we didn't have before unless we'd added extra code to our website so it's actually a lot more powerful from that point of view but there's some terminology changes that we're going to need to know to get the most out of it the key thing about ga4 is that the basic reports there but there's not many there you need to be able to edit these reports and to create custom reports and it's really worth understanding a bit of terminology so three phrases that will be really useful first of all everything is now an event page view is an event so that page being looked at a form started to be filled in an event a form being completed as an event a pdf downloaded as an event so these are all different events that we can track and that's what it's reporting on so we can go through and we can track all those kind of events happening and then a lot of the reports have what we call dimensions and metrics so in this case on the left hand side the things you can see are the values of the dimension the dimension is the channel groups you know so where's my traffic coming from organic search google search or is it coming from paid search or is it coming from somewhere else like that so the dimensions we see are something to describe something about something so in this case it's describing what channel it is that I came from the metrics are numbers that are related to that so average engagement time engage sessions per user so basically how many times is the average person coming along how many events did they trigger each time they visited so a session is basically a visit what's the engagement rate therefore and so on so it's really worth understanding you get dimensions you can add secondary dimensions so I could say yes it's organic search but what search engine was it so I could say right I want to know that what's called the source and the medium so I can add those dimensions second dimensions and then with all of these reports I can add different metrics but I'm trying to track so whenever you go to any GA4 report you'll see these things showing up over on the right hand side top right hand side you can edit that report and you can change what's visualized you can change the chart to charts that's where the power really is or in the custom reports as well quick tip as well when you edit the standard reports you can hit save and it will save over the standard report for everyone so don't do that save it as a new report because yet you're going to find that you're going to confuse everyone else and confuse yourself probably in the long term as well so we've basically got a bit of new terminology and it's worth explaining the difference in how it used to be and how it is now we used to talk about goals a lot and a goal was somebody doing the thing you wanted them to do and you had four options destination someone got to my thank you page thank you for buying thank you for fleeing the fault I know you've done something then duration someone stays more than five minutes pages per session someone looks at all the three pages or an event well that meant we'd added extra code to our web pages to track something so most of us just ended up using destination goals you got to a page I know you did something therefore I'm going to track that well we don't have goals at all anymore it's all now moved to conversion events so what it means is when you go into GA4 you're going to need to set these up because you're not really going to get the most out of it otherwise and it could be a bit confusing so what you would generally do is you start by creating in the settings a new event and let's let's think about it in a couple of different scenarios so maybe I create an event and I had to give it a name so first of all there'll be a drop down you can write anything you want in use something in the drop down these are called recommended events and recommended events will show up in all the standard reports it's already great if you don't use those names it will just be hidden you'll have to create a new report to see it so don't you want to do that so use the drop down and select it then you're going to say okay I want to create an event give it a name and then what happens well it's a page view okay but then you need to add a condition so it's when someone gets to this particular page or maybe it's a form being filled in but the condition is it's this particular form or it's on this page or maybe it's a video being viewed but it's a video on this particular page so you'll give it an action an event and there's loads of standard ones your page view scroll all that kind of stuff but then you need to give it a condition of saying it was the form on this particular page my thank you for thank you for buying okay if you do that you create an event and then you can say that's a conversion event now I've got instructions doing this in detail which I'll provide afterwards but the point being that it's not as easy to set up as it was before learning that as a skill set is really in demand at the moment because there's not many marketers that have learned that they feel a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing and they've stepped away I promise you it's not that complicated you just once you understand some of these fundamentals it makes a big difference so big change in the marketing world you'd think you know it was basically in July when it happened most organizations still haven't got the head around this a lot of having but it's set up properly yet either so a good set of skills to learn let's come back to this cookie piece because this is really fundamentally changing how Google work how Facebook work and people like that so you would have heard the blocking of third-party cookies and I think a lot of people don't really understand in detail what this means so it's worth getting a head around so you go in your browser the cookie is something that's being set in your browsers to remember what you've done previously so I go to a news website and on that news website I see some ads the cookie's gonna be set on my machine to remember what I've seen and what I haven't seen so maybe I go to site one who's setting the cookie in my browser well it's not site one that would be the first party the website is it's not there and actually it's not the second party it's not the advertiser that set the cookie in reality in this situation it's the advertising network the Google display network in this case just as an example and they're placing ads across three million different websites tracking what you look at and then kind of using that target stuff at you or Safari for example and other browsers have come out and said we did opt in for third-party cookies when we clicked on that thing do you want to use this website yeah get out of the way okay but actually we probably didn't know what we were opting in for so Safari said right we're blocking them from now that's a clever move for two reasons one it basically positions Safari and Apple as trustworthy but also it denies their competitors Google Facebook and other people have lots of data they had before now even Google came out quite some time ago more than a year ago and said yeah we kind of agree third-party cookies aren't perfect we're going to cut off a new solution they haven't started doing that yet I had an answer for the reason that they're going to start in Google Chrome blocking third-party cookies or moving away from them in January of 2024 so so what does that mean it just means they'll have less of this form of data so what else they doing well they're now collecting data in different ways but if you think about it you've got this cookie data and I know what you've searched for in Google and what you look at in YouTube and what you're saying in Gmail I can use all of that and I can start to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to start to model what different people will do so let's take an example of that in practice this is really important if you're if you're getting into doing any Google ads as well this is a performance max campaign and instead of me going in and saying right here's the add-on one and I want to put it in front of people in London on this day you know with this demographic instead of doing that I just point it on my website and it finds images and logos and videos texts and descriptions I can edit those and highlight but what it's really going to do is say I think your website's about this so I'm going to start showing your ads to people and it's using all of these assets mixing them up in different ways and showing them in YouTube Gmail Google search results the display network which is those three million websites I talked about and then the Google the discover app for Google and then it will work out this headline with this description this text works really well for this type of person and it keeps testing and testing and testing until it works out what's actually working and what's not so this is an example of Google kind of moving away from the cookie piece and moving much more towards machine learning because they haven't got that same level of cookie data what's also important to kind of understand is why you've lost control of your brand a little bit because you don't know which heading which description which image so therefore it's worth thinking about all those options but also these campaigns are generally performing much much better than your standards campaign but this will only work well if you have GA for set up properly why is that because if you set your conversion events up it knows what you're trying to achieve and then it will optimize for those things without that it's going to make it really hard to go through and kind of optimize in that way as well so let's move on talk about some other trends as well I haven't embedded this in because playing videos and audio and go to meetings not not always 100 reliable but what I've done here this is a tool called descript and descript is a tool that basically allows me to edit podcasts very easily so I upload a podcast it creates a transcription I can then edit that podcast by editing the transcription so I cut a piece of text out it will cut it out the audio it also does the same with video it does a brilliant thing now if you're recording a video straight to camera like I am now but actually I'm reading some notes I might be looking over here and if my eyes are going backwards and forwards on the notes it looks terrible on the video it now has an AI tool that will make it look like I'm looking at the camera and it will correct my eyes so they're going forwards as well it's quite unnerving because it does a good job the other thing it does is very much make it possible to deep fake someone's voice I mean I've got hours and hours of podcast recordings and I've literally just typed them in count select virtual Daniel and it will really in my voice and it is indistinguishable to in most extent what you'll notice though if I point it out here is that the sentence says welcome back to the digital marketing podcast my name's Daniel Rolls and I'll be your host through this fast changing world of digital skills I've spelled podcasting correctly it looks like I put an R in it the reason for that is when it does the kind of fake of my voice otherwise this is a podcast which is very American whereas if I put an R in podcast sounds much more English so it's not 100% but it's very very easy to do so if you've got a recording of anyone's voice you can pretty easily deep fake them at this stage so we've got to be careful so trust in anything that we hear is going to disappear what does that mean from a marketing point of view and no one really knows us yet but if you've got anyone's voice politician celebrity anyone else that's been recorded you can deep fake their voice now from that point of view the kind of other side of this and this is and I can share this video afterwards this is from what was some work that's going on at Metta previously you know Facebook and when you see what they're doing you know with with the whole kind of metaverse thing you might be a little bit suspicious but actually I think is it really worth it is it have they made a bit of a misstep here what you can see here is basically the person on the camera here takes their phone and scans their own face takes about 15 seconds and to scan their face pulls lots of different faces then within about an hour it generates an avatar that is photo realistic and then she can write things in it deep fakes her voice it makes her facial movement it moves her eyes and you could use this for creating videos for doing virtual calls all those kind of things but also you can go into virtual reality or augmented reality and you can put yourself into that location using your avatar and these avatar technologies moving pretty quickly we're seeing it with a new google headset that's coming out as well because imagine you've got your headset on and you're doing maybe a zoom call or something like that and the other person isn't got a headset on it's going to look a bit strange that you're sitting on a zoom call with a headset on so instead of doing that it generates an avatar of you that's supposed to be photo realistic to your page as well sit to your face sorry so we're not quite there with this stuff but we can deep fake audio almost 100% deep faking video it's getting there pretty quickly so we're in a world where we can't trust nothing we hear and actually trusting anything we see is going to be increasingly kind of challenging as well now the logical future of this is that at the moment we've got on mobile devices we're looking at those you know 120 150 times a day depending on the statue looker then apple have released their augmented reality headset so you can overlay things to what you're seeing but there's a bit of friction it gets in the way then we're probably having a pair of glasses that can do the same thing this is something called mojo this takes the next step this is a contact lens we can overlay things on top of what you see now bear that in mind that means you can change what things look like and you can change what you look like to other people and if you've been watching black mirror you'll be familiar with some of these ideas already there's a great presentation and if you've seen one of our presentations where I've mentioned this before so so forgive me but uh samson when they kind of launched a prototype of this product they came on stage at mobile world congress and said imagine that you have a pet cat they might look really confused but you wish that you had a pet dog when you look at the cat it will just look like a dog now you don't need to extrapolate that very far to the work out my wife won't be looking at this anymore she'll have Brad Pitt or someone else walking around the house but as marketers getting our head around what it means when we can change what things look like at the moment you might have an ad blocker built into your browser you could have a brand blocker forever in the world if you're going to boycott a brand for ethical reasons you can make it disappear you won't see it what if you've got a really annoying colleague or you could create a colleague blocker and you could make them invisible so this is a kind of logical conclusion of where it's going but it also opens up an awful lot of questions and that brings us to the last topic i just want to talk about for five minutes or so which is there's a lot of talk about community and it's kind of worth trying to understand why that's the case in a really noisy environment broadcasting to your audience is hard but if we can create a community of people that are speaking to each other that's quite powerful and that will cut for a lot of the noise because people will seek out that engagement and it's multi-way communications so it's a huge speaking to your audience your audience speaking to each other the audience speaking back to us and so on as well so generating community becomes pretty powerful and i'll give you some practical examples so really there's been three eras of marketing started with mass media when we started seeing huge brand building advertising and big tv ads and big print ads and then we moved into the world of digital and first of all digital is very mass media get stuff broadcast it out to everyone but then we started to get smart when we moved into what we kind of referred to as personalization so the right content the right person at the right time in the right channel in reality we're still really bad at this because we haven't integrated all of our systems a lot of three letter acronyms coming up so we haven't integrated our crm our customer relationship management with our esp our email service provider in turn with our cms content management system in line with our erp our enterprise resource planning etc so have we put our systems together so when you hit my website i know what you've done at the call center or what product you bought previously or just what you've done on my website before in my email system can i look at what type of customer you are etc so that's that's where we are but really we're not doing regular works we need to get better at this stuff and the more we can do this more we can really personalize and make sure i'm not just shouting at you and broadcasting at you i'm giving you the right stuff that's really relevant to you i'm really understanding your user journey not giving you the wrong stuff and so on and then we move into this kind of next era supposedly which is of community of shared relevance so that's shared relevant with that the family is a type of community a neighborhood is a type of community but actually what about marketers in companies where there is only one marketer that are trying to start to date with digital marketing that's quite a nice niche community i could speak to or i could speak to people that are marketing directors that have got teams that they're really struggling to keep up so those are both communities i could create that would be useful for my organization but in order to make that into the kind of two-way conversation i need to think about how i'm going to where's that going to live could live in a social discussion group so it could be in Slack could be in a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group although those things are hard to manage it could be that actually this lives in real world meetups now for us we've done this in a slightly different way we have our podcast so we are kind of broadcasting out but we encourage people to come back and fill in forms and sign up for emails and ask us questions and then we have an email newsletter and i would really encourage you to think of email as a social channel it's never defined it as one but think of it as a two-way channel you email people they should be able to email you back it shouldn't be like a no reply email it's a terrible terrible bit of user experience so i can say right if you love the podcast and you're trying to stay up to digital marketing subscribe to our newsletter we'll send you out really useful stuff but you can reply to that and ask us questions then we'll do live webinars like this where you can ask questions and you can engage and so on as well so just starting to create a bit more of a community around something and that feels more connected and by doing that we can cut through the noise because that's our trusted source of information it's not just somebody trying to sell me something it's a community that's coming together and trying to kind of engage and learn in this case so let's go through and give some examples look at some some resources first of all if you're an example community for something you wouldn't think would work particularly well take a look at HubSpot HubSpot is a B2B it's a business to business customer relationship management system and they have done brilliantly well first of all market themselves almost like a consumer brand but secondly they have these big communities if you ever go to the HubSpot conference which I really recommend they have meet-ups of all these different groups of people and they get people together and engage and actually their biggest sales route is through their partners and their partners resell their product so they bring those people together and so on so it's a nice example of building community of something you would think doesn't necessarily work particularly well so general advice and then some resources to finish me up in an environment where it's noisier and noisier and when you have got more and more AI tools it's more and more important that we lean into our humanity and what I mean by that is what makes us human so our ability to communicate with each other it's our ability to understand how someone else is feeling it's the ability to connect all of those things are really important and they will help you to cut through the level of noise that we're potentially dealing with now where I first heard this there's the credit this there's a professor Celia Moore from Imperial College who is an ethics professor and she's really concerned about the the fact that we're spending more time online we're interacting with AI's more we're spending less human connection and we're doing more zoom calls we're not necessarily seeing each other face to face and so on so actually that leaning into our humanity is really important so we keep that connection and actually as marketers think about that how can that help us to cut through things and really connect with our target audience understand what they need and what they want and provide that in an appropriate kind of way so some resources that you can take away first of all we do something called the digital skills benchmark digital marketing skills benchmark with the CIM every year we've just completed the brand new one if you want to you can benchmark yourself for free you can benchmark your team if you've got a team or a group of you for free as well just to show what's happened to results this year what you'll see is quite hard to make out the screen but I'll describe it in the darker green is where we were in 2021 2023 where we are now the lighter green it's been a small increase but not a huge amount you'll also notice most of it is really close to the center still you know we're terrible at content marketing still analytics skills have fallen backwards potentially on the right it goes as confidence and you can see there's a lot of confidence in content particularly but we really rubbish at it so it's quite telling we've broken this down by industry we've broken it down by seniority so you can download the report for free you don't even need to put an email in and also you can benchmark yourself as well we won't share that if anyone I promise so I'll give you the link for that in just a second biggest risk in this we found was head of department level because those people are now managing a team but they're not actually doing the doing anymore so their skills are falling behind so go and have a look at the report it covers content strategy analytics email social media all those different topics you can see where skills are what it means that is you don't have to be a hundred percent you just need to be better than everyone else at this which isn't that hard to do so there's a really good opportunity in some of these kind of spaces still now all of the websites the little tools I mentioned are in our digital marketing toolkit so if you google digital marketing toolkits at the top of google below the ads you will see the target internet website click on that and it's got it's a curated list of all the best tools or you go target internet.com forward slash toolkit we also do the toolkit awards that we've you'll see that it highlights the one that won the awards I mean there as well there's a downloadable PDF and there's also a kind of interactive version so no adverts when they're thinking there you can download all that stuff and play around the tools in there under content or maybe AI actually you'll find jasper and there's a free trial of that writing tool which is kind of fun as well just some final resources before questions right if you want to connect up afterwards on twitter or x if any of you using twitter anymore uh daniel rolls instagram kind of connects up there really happy to connect up there it's target internet but that is me and then on linkedin it's daniel rolls so you can connect up in any of those places really happy to connect up there. In terms of the resources take away the benchmark the website target internet.com forward slash benchmark benchmark yourself down to report for free forward slash toolkit you've got all the tools in there and then forward slash podcast if you want the weekly podcast quick little prize kind of giveaway for you as well we've just relaunched our youtube channel youtube.com forward slash target internet go in there and subscribe and if you subscribe to that any of the new subscribers we get over the next couple of days we're doing a prize draw and we're going to give away a year's membership to target internet to access all that online learning stuff as well so if that's the key take away go to the youtube youtube.com forward slash target internet subscribe in there and there's an opportunity to get free access to all our premium stuff as well that is it for me in terms of slides i'm sure phil has potentially got some questions uh so back to you philly if you've got some questions for me now yes we have indeed uh daniel another brilliant presentation um obviously you do this presentation every year it's amazing to see what things have happened over the last year i think i'll possibly predict what's going to happen in 12 months time it's a fast moving industry um okay so we have got um a few questions in or really but just reminder that uh you still post those um for the next uh Q and R sessions for about 10 minutes or so 20 miles for some of those questions let's just remind that if you want to find it more about the marketing club you can use the QR code with pop up one screen here and if you want to find the best sessions on the socials you can use the hashtag to aim events okay so the first question daniel goes back to uploading data um really start the presentation what are the GDPR impacts of uploading data from a CRM to chat gpt for example if wanting to analyze flying data so what you shouldn't be doing is uploading personally identifiable data so there's a couple of things here there are some professional tools that will allow you to upload data into an AI but it will keep it in your private repository so as long as you've got permission to use people's data in third-party tools that are private to you you can do that the thing is things like gpt unless you've selected it and you've got a per account it's going to use it to start training the AI a little bit more so best practice would suggest do not go through uh and start uploading personally identifiable information what you can do is anonymize that data upload it and analyze it and then when you get it back you can join it back together with anything that's personally identifiable as well the other thing to be careful of is when you're maybe saying like training it on some of your content you're basically in many cases opting in to allow it to look at your content and train the AI on it so in the pro situation quite often what you're doing is going through and saying I only want you to keep this in a personal repository uh and chat gpt amongst others is starting to give you the ability jasper does some of that stuff as well gives you some privacy controls over things the other thing we don't know from ethical point of view is what these data sets were trained on so if for example they're just trained on loads of websites and those websites are full of fake news potentially AI will think that is potentially true as well so there's a lot of ethical questions there's a very good question because there's a lot of ethical questions starting to come out about this so be well informed be aware of the legislation and privacy what you kind of can't share anonymized data wherever possible and don't share anything that's kind of private to your organization is my general advice unless you're absolutely sure of what the particular platform does with it. Okay very good advice so Daniel now similar theme what's the best AI tool to get insights from social media data? So what I would probably do there's a lot of data sets online in Kaggle so kaggle um Kaggle will allow you to download lots of data sets like you know twitter comments about particular news stories or whatever it might be so you need a data set to start from the other way to do it is to use a data scraping tool so if you do search what is data scraping we you'll find at top giggle we've got a tutorial about it and it will tell you how to scrape data so you could basically do a search in x or something like that you could grab some of that data um there are limits into what you are and aren't allowed to grab um but you could you could grab that data and then you can upload that into one of these tools and get it to analyze be careful of copyright and those kind of things but if I give you an example I could go in and maybe do a search or find a website that's got all the mentions of the jobs in my location and I can use data scraping tool to go to all of those pages and download the job titles the job descriptions and the salaries I could then go in and create a document that data scraping upload it into chat gpt and go analyze this tell me what the average salary is the average salary with the job title includes nursing and the average salary with the job title includes data and it will be able to do that level of analysis for you but you need the data in the first place so you either got a download some data from someone like Kaggle or you've got to scrape that data in some way from somewhere else and get the access to it or you can actually pay people like twitter to have access to their feed um in some cases as well but you need to start with a data set um is it okay to use AI for SEO this is a good question so about year and a half two years ago Google came out and said um it's not okay to use AI generated content on your website and if you do so you will potentially be penalized in the search results i.e. they will see you're using AI content and they'll punish you and push down the search rankings then about eight months ago Google came out uh and said good content is good content we don't mind where it comes from so what they're basically saying is like we're going to judge content on the same basis of quality you can use our tools to help you but if you create rubbish we'll work that out and they've got all this stuff now about eat which is expertise authoritativeness and trust they're trying to look at is your website trusted other people are writing your website trusted um are you exploring both facts and your opinions of things and so so if you look up eat for SEO you'll kind of see that so yes it's fine to use SEO tools but you still need to create exceptional content the thing i always refer people to is a guy called Rand Fishkin's 10x content the idea of 10x content is you go out and say i want to be number one for this in SEO okay research all the other stuff that's out there and really understand it and consume it and then go how do i do something that's 10 times better and if i don't do something that's 10 times better i might as well have not done it because it's just not going to stand out so you can use you can use AI for SEO but you just need to when you're creating content you just need to be sure that what you're creating is actually of high quality and if you do that it will still work as long as it's useful to the target audience so that's the key is it valuable to my target audience it's just if you're still achieving that then it's it's perfectly valuable content from that point of view there are lots of AI tools that will analyze SEO effective this and so on as well they've been around for a long time most of the SEO tools like SEM rush and things like that to some extent using artificial intelligence and analysis to to do that so it's okay just be careful make sure you're creating great content okay thanks how do you recommend we reassure customers about how AI is used in marketing the industry sector banking the customer trust is called to the business key thing here is clarity and frequency of communication so people worry about things we did a debate at the CIM at the House of Commons and we were arguing that the AI is not what poses a risk to the industry it's the use and regulation of AI and actually how we educate ourselves so really good organizations what they're doing is writing policies this is what we do this is what we don't do but they're doing it in a way they communicate that to their customers and say right AI this is how we're using it this is how we're using the data I want you to be clear on that we won't do this but they're having to update those policies on a really regular basis because that's going to change so I think getting together and working out what that policy should look like what should you do what shouldn't you do and then having clarity with your customers about how you're going to do that and that's got to align with your GDPR policy your data and cybersecurity policy and all those sorts of things as well trust absolutely is key and it's really saying we are going to use AI in this way and this is where the benefit is for you so kind of being really honest about those things so we've had it with marketing agencies where they're using AI and they're not trying to pretend they're not now the risk is the customers go to you well if you're using AI you're quicker I want to reduce the fees they say no everyone's using AI now so actually you know we're going to improve our effectiveness our efficiency but we've still then got to create really exceptional content so standing out from everything else is increasingly difficult so I think it really is about creating those policies updates and regularly having those conversations internally and staying up to date with a lot of these things as well which is challenging but in reality the regulators are not going to set the tone for this because the regulators won't be able to stay up to date so as organizations we have to prove our trust by saying what we will do and really importantly what we won't do as well. Just changing techniques could you please mention what the main or primary digital marketing skills are that you need to develop as a marketer in 2023? Yeah I would say if you look at our digital skills benchmark we break it down into 14 core areas so I mean you don't need to know all of those you can download the benchmark and it will show you what the areas are but I mean I would say if you look at analytics and data so understanding measurement really important place to start I would say yes we want to kind of understand social media but that doesn't mean understanding all of the channels necessarily it's about the key principles and in line with that is content marketing so it's great to have search engine optimization skills but you might specialize you might say and this is there's always been an argument in my opinion should you be a generalist should you be a specialist I was always a generalist but probably had deeper dive knowledge into the technical and analytics aspects of things so I think you don't need to be a generalist or a specialist what you need to be is t-shaped and what I mean by that is you need a broad set of skills to understand broadly all those different 14 areas to some extent and then you had the bottom of the t which is the bit that dies down into your particular area of expertise so you can be a problem solver but you can imply in depth knowledge if I were to look at the market now and say what skills are probably the most in demand analytics definitely content creation aligned with social media AI prompting is a big one but I would say we still do email badly if you can be really great email there's still opportunity for that and search optimization is constantly changing overall this really is the strategy piece as well because you should always take any marketing problem you should take a step back and say who's the target persona what does the user journey look like what are their objectives what are my organizational objectives so I think having some of that planning knowledge and that could be as simple as understanding a framework like SOS stack which is Paul R Smith's framework my planning framework there's Dave chaff is race framework and lots of others as well but I think you've got you need to know your tactics your channels you need to know how to measure those channels but also you want to look at some of those planning skills so you do take a step back and think about personas and use a journey planning as well so there's a there's a pretty broad range of things in there and that's the challenge with that as well but as long as you've got a framework that says I start with looking into the market I work at my objectives are I look at my channels how I'm going to use them and I know how to measure it that's really key I think GA for skills at the moment massively in demand so that that's certainly something worth looking into from that point of view as well but I think you also need to look at what you enjoy and what you're good at and if you can you know in some way combine those two things the other thing I would say is you know this terrible bit of advice I think this is personal opinion which is about you know do what you do what you enjoy do what you love I don't necessarily love analytics but I found I'm quite good at teasing out information from it and if you become a good at something by becoming good at it you can develop a network you can develop reputation and you can build a career off the back of it so start with the 14 areas start to drill in to understand work out what you enjoy and you're good at and then you can maybe focus your t-shape that bottom piece into those particular areas but try and get that broad set of knowledge at the top so it's like a bit exciting time actually to be in marketing Daniel so thank you very much for all of that unfortunately although we've got loads of questions so we have to ask we went out of time um so once again Daniel another fantastic presentation thank you indeed again um unfortunately that's it for our marketing club webinar today I'd just like to thank Daniel again for delivering a fantastic presentation and we hope you've enjoyed the session that just brings me to say a final thank you to you for joining us today we do hope you've enjoyed the webinar take care of you up and we look forward to seeing you again soon