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Monday’s Marketing Minute: AI’s Impact on Marketing Jobs, Elon’s Product Demo, Video Use in Social

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you are ready to have an amazing productive week! So after temps that flirted with 100 for several days last week, we are temps mostly in the 80s this week, as we could be dealing with some rain from Idalia(?) in the gulf. Hopefully, last week was the last truly hot week we will have this year.  Temps here usually peak around the last week of Aug and first week of Sept.  It will still be hot for most of Sept, but humidity should start to fall soon, making the heat a lot more bearable. Fingers crossed!

Back to business, here’s a few news stories that caught my eye…

 

Kelly always shares such interesting content. I thought this survey of how AI will impact marketing and communication jobs was interesting. Note that AI is expected to have a positive impact across the board, until you get to team culture and number of jobs. So basically, we are expecting AI to be a boon for individual productivity, but we also think it will hurt collaboration and team culture. I’m wondering if this could lead to a scenario where AI becomes almost a surrogate for a team member, and is designed to facilitate interaction and engagement between team members. It’s such early days in AI’s development and implementation. What will see in just a year’s time will be miles from where we are now.

 

So this isn’t really ‘news’, but I enjoyed this demo that Elon did for Tesla’s autopilot driving, which if I understood correctly, is powered by AI. As Elon was driving, he explained that AI was used to train the cars on how to drive. In fact, only video of real people driving was used, not code. Basically, Elon just picked points on the car’s map, and let the car drive him to that location.

For the most part, the car did very well, but I did see a couple of hiccups in the 10 mins or so I watched (The video was interesting but not THAT interesting). Early on, Elon went through an area that was under construction, and he remarked that the construction hadn’t been there the last time he drove through the area. The lanes at one point shifted over to accomodate the construction, and Elon remarked that the car had picked the wrong lane, but just as he said that, it corrected and pulled into the correct lane as dictated by the construction. Another instance was where the car came to a red light where the turn lane next to the car was green. Elon yelled ‘Intervention!’ and had to take control as the car started to attempt to cross the intersection, even though it had a red light. Elon explained that they would have to give the car more video of navigating intersections like this so that it knows what to do.

As I was seeing the two hiccups and corrections, I was recalling how Robert Scoble would video programmers working at their computers years ago when he worked at Microsoft. He said sometimes Windows would crash and he would video it. These imperfections actually made the content more credible, as it recorded what would happen in real life. I think the couple of hiccups Elon videoed that I saw work the same way, because we know there will be issues, but only seeing a couple means it performed very well 99% of the time.  Video content is big right now, as we will see in the next news item, and it still pays for you to develop a personal brand on social media, even if you work for a company.  More on this in tomorrow’s post.

 

This really shouldn’t be news to any of you, but people love video content in their social media streams. In fact, by 2025, 60% of our time on social networking sites will be spend consuming video content. While our time spent with video continues to increase, it’s worth noting that the growth rate seems to have plateaued over the last year or so.  Usage will continue to grow, but only marginally, after seeing nearly 20% yearly growth less than 5 years ago.

 

So that’s it for this Monday’s Marketing Minute. I hope you have a great week, as I alluded to earlier, I will have a fun announcement tomorrow about a new weekly series I will be running from now on, something I first started waaaaaay back in 2006. See you then, have a great week!

 

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Case Study: Creating Different Video Content For Different Audiences

I’ve talked before about how you can create different types of content based on the Buyer’s Journey, or where they are in the purchase process.

There are four different stages in general:

1 – Unaware and I don’t care.  This person doesn’t know who you are or why they should care about you. So in order to connect with this person, you don’t talk about your company AT ALL. You talk about the potential customer.  That will get their attention and give you a chance to move to the next stages.

2 – Slightly Aware. At this stage the customer has some idea of who your company is and what it does. At this stage you want to create content that helps the customer understand how your products or services fit into their lives, or relate to them. This will help them understand how your company’s products and services can help them, and will grow their interest in your company.

3 – Interested. At this stage the customer knows who you are, knows why your products or services are valuable to them, and is considering making a purchase. At this stage you want to focus almost completely on the product or service you are selling. You have to keep in mind that at this stage, the customer is doing research in anticipation of making a purchase. So give them detailed information on what you have to offer.

4 – Ready to buy, take my money! Pretty self-explanatory, the customer is ready to make a purchase. At this stage you simply complete the transaction, no need to continue to sell to them, they are ready to buy.

 

To give you an idea of how you can create different types of video content, I wanted to go back to the example of how Twitch content creator @nickmercs is creating content for his YouTube channel. I talked about Nick’s video content before, he will stream several hours a day on Twitch, then condense this gameplay down to 15-20 minutes of his ‘best’ content, and post that to YouTube. Nick monetizes his YouTube channel so he gets paid by views, but if we were thinking about where this content would typically fall in the above categories, it would go under the Aware stage. People that watch Nick’s videos are typically aware of who he is, and want to see his content.

But a few weeks ago, Nick did something a bit different with his content on his YouTube channel. He and two teammates won a $100,000 Call of Duty: Warzone tournament. He then created a video where he walks the audience through exactly what he and his team did in the final game that led to them winning the tournament. He breaks down every movement, why they did what they did (or what the ‘strat’ was, as the kids say), and talks about how viewers can replicate his success as they are playing the game. This type of content is much more in depth than a simple highlight video, and as such is aimed at a slightly different audience:

Now, Nick is monetizing his YouTube channel so the content he creates is all about maximizing views. This particular video was done as a bit of an experiment, it seems, just to see how the audience would react. This video currently has over 600,000 views, which is huge, but many of Nick’s Warzone videos have more views. It makes sense that this video would have fewer views, because it would appeal to a smaller audience than his typical ‘highlight’ video. If you were to place this video into one of the above four categories, it would fall under the Interested category for customers who are in the research phase. Now Nick is making money off his YouTube channel via monetization, but if he wanted to sell personal coaching services where he mentored players to perform well in eSports tournaments like Warzone, a video such as this would be a perfect way to sell such services.

Just keep in mind that the type of content you create at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey transcends the content channel. If they are Unaware and just entering your sales or marketing funnel, you create content focused solely on the customer. When they are near the bottom of the funnel in the Interested stage, you talk about what it is that you are selling. Doesn’t matter if you are creating blog posts, videos, podcasts, whatever.