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Evaluating technology options for innovation in marketing - do you know your Hype Cycles?

If you're involved in marketing strategy development, you will be constantly making judgments and reviewing with colleagues which digital technology innovations are most relevant to your organization. The Gartner Hype Cycle, which is published each year is a good tool to use to find out about both newly emerging innovations and more established marketing technology that could be relevant. In this article, we compare different examples of the well-established Gartner Hype Cycle tools which serve to highlight the adoption of new technology services within marketing technology. Gartner publishes many different hype cycles reviewing the adoption curves for different types of technologies, but as a digital strategist, I am most interested in those focusing on digital marketing technologies. A summary of the report with the infographic is published annually and I have been monitoring them and sharing them for over…

15 practical examples of GPT-3/GPT-4 prompts to support content marketing, email marketing, search and social media marketing

In Part 1, of my review of marketing applications of Chat GPT,  I reviewed the quality of output and interactions of the GPT-3 Large Language Model (LLM) on which ChatGPT is trained by asking: How can I use ChatGPT for marketing? I showed how you can use ChatGPT for learning more about digital marketing and marketing planning by creating plans. In this article, I will explain some practical use cases of how marketers can use Chat GPT for content marketing to support different digital marketing channels. We'll see that knowing how to Prompt ChatGPT will be a key skill, so I'll show different Prompting techniques before reviewing specific applications for the different digital marketing channels. Some of the key digital marketing channels that I'll describe are summarised in this visual from my book Digital marketing:…

My example dialogues and use cases show the amazing opportunities for marketers from ChatGPT and other generative AI tools

I’ve been advising on digital marketing and new innovations for over 25 years. Since it was called Internet Marketing… This tends to make you super cynical as to new claims about marketing innovations. Over this time, many of the techniques for digital marketing and approaches to planning digital marketing strategies and campaigns have remained similar. Much Martech now promises to be be ‘AI-powered’ while still relying on manual analysis and customizations. In fact, I’d say that it’s the development of search and social media platforms that have been the main drivers of change. Until now, that is... Having tested ChatGPT, I believe it will spark mainstream adoption of AI amongst marketers, since it will be used as a practical tool to support creative development to help marketers working on search, email and social media…

Mapping the most effective AI technologies for marketing across the customer lifecycle in the coming year

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is a hot topic in marketing at the moment, with the huge interest in ChatGPT (see our articles on using ChatGPT for marketing). But AI is a broad term covering a wide range of different technologies, many of which have been available for some time. We originally wrote this article based on the opportunities for using AI for marketing in 2017 and have updated it since with examples. Artificial intelligence means any technology that seeks to mimic human intelligence, which covers a huge range of capabilities such as voice and image recognition, machine learning techniques and semantic search. That's why, in our AI and Machine Learning briefing for members, we have identified fifteen artificial intelligence techniques that businesses of all sizes can implement, rather than techniques that only major tech giants can devote…

Practical ideas for you to use including how to use ChatGPT

Each year, for the last 10 years, or so, I have identified the latest trends in digital marketing and forecast what the major trends will be in the year ahead. The aim is to help marketers and business owners find new marketing ideas, review their budget investments and put together their plans. There’s always a lot of interest as businesses consider tactics they can deploy to gain an edge by using some of the latest techniques. This review covers the latest developments in digital marketing across the many digital marketing channels tools that businesses can use shown in the visual below based on our RACE digital marketing framework. I cover ChatGPT at the end of the article. We developed this to help businesses develop a robust approach to developing integrated digital marketing strategies across 25 key activities which we define as…

Examples of digital marketing tools and techniques to give you an edge in the year ahead

Well, we’ve nearly made it! For years I’ve been looking to the future, predicting how innovations in digital media, platforms and technology will shape marketing in 2020. The cutting edge examples certainly show the exciting opportunities available - there is almost too much choice… In this article, I’ll explore six key marketing trends based on examples and research on the adoption of the latest marketing techniques and technology marketers can use. For recommendations on tapping into the innovations in different digital marketing channels, including email, social media and search engine marketing, see all the other posts from the Smart Insights team covering channel-specific digital marketing trends for 2020.

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In 2020, we can see the huge impact that digital marketing has had over the last decade, and more. Looking at advertising alone, these eMarketer predictions show…

The importance of creating a team and culture that thinks differently

Consider the marketing campaigns, advertisements, PR stunts and billboards that have caught the public’s imagination over the years. Whether it’s the Conservative party’s ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster, Benson & Hedges’ ‘Iguana’ ad or the Cadbury gorilla, they all have something in common: they offer something completely different from what had come before. In today’s noisy and crowded media landscape, it’s arguably never been more important to think differently. Yet despite the vast number of ads we’re confronted with every day, people dislike advertising. This study from Kantar asked a representative sample of consumers how they felt about advertising.…

In its recent comparative advertising campaign, Google promotes its Pixel 3a model as a cheaper and higher quality choice over Apple’s XS, putting it side-by-side with the Apple product in a face-off of the tech giants.

Why beat about the bush in advertising when you can directly compare your own product to a competitor’s higher-priced and (in Google’s opinion) inferior one? We’ve seen examples of this kind of advertising for many years, from supermarket chains’ regular competitor comparisons to the “Get a Mac“ campaigns of the noughties. It appears that Google felt it was high time that this time round a company went after Apple. Indeed, Google has set its sights on Apple, with billboards and video ads from the Alphabet-owned company claiming that the Pixel 3a provides better quality low-light photography at a fraction of the…

Voice technology will be huge in 2019, with smart speakers driving this revolution. Let’s look at some of the key ways voice can boost marketing activity and engage audiences

A bit of background

Voice technology uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI to provide a more intuitive way of interacting with devices including smart speakers. Although the underlying technology has been in development for decades, it is only with recent advances in computing that it has been practical and reliable. Now let’s take a brief look at the main smart speaker platforms. [si_guide_block id="70611" title="Download our Free Resource – Essential digital marketing tools" description="This guide gives Free members a preview of the 30 categories of digital marketing tools you should be using for your marketing."/]

Amazon Alexa

Currently the most popular smart speakers with global sales of 100 million devices. Alexa technology is available in a wide range of devices from the entry level Echo Dot through…

Our review showing examples of the latest innovations in digital media, technology, and data to support digital transformation

We love reviewing innovation in marketing. It’s interesting to see ‘what’s hot’ and ‘what’s cool’, but to keep it practical and actionable as we like, we’re equally interested in which communications and transformation techniques will make the biggest commercial improvement for businesses. A good example of the commercial impact digital technology and media can have is Dominos. I recently heard about the impact of digitization of Dominos from Dave Wild, their UK CEO at Technology for Marketing / E-commerce Expo. Dominos UK only took its first mobile phone order in 2010 when online sales accounted for less than 30% of revenue. Eight years on, Dominos have a market share of more than 50% with digital transactions accounts for more than 80% of sales and the UK smartphone app accounting for more than two-thirds of those…