What is the State of Marketing in 2024?

For many marketers and creatives, 2023 was a bit of a “lost year” in terms of growth and productivity.

Speaking anecdotally, many friends and colleagues lamented that the year was leaner than expected, thanks to inflation and the cost of living crisis contributing to lower advertising budgets.

Like Marshall McLuhan says, we speed into the future looking at the rearview mirror. After reviewing Hubspot and Salesforce State of Marketing 2024 reports, here is an overview of what marketing firms are doing in the face of new opportunities - and threats - from artificial intelligence and regulatory sharks circling around third-party data collection and social media such as TikTok.

What is the state of marketing in 2024?

PERSONALISATION IS KING

Sure, content is king - but personalisation is even better. According to Hubspot, “87% of marketers plan to continue or increase their investment in mobile messaging through channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.” That means constant engagement with customers using these channels, powered by Generative AI chatbots. 96% of marketers say personalization leads to repeat business, and 94% say it increases sales.

Their research also shows that it has an over 120x return on investment, on average. Hubspot also found that 55% of businesses predict that by 2024, most people will turn to chatbots over search engines for answers.

According to a Kibo survey, personalising the entire customer experience led to 3x ROI than forgoing personalisation. Salesforce says that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Of course, this will need an end-to-end strategy at the top and bottom of funnels to implement with any measure of success.

Imperator Email INVICTUS

If personalised messaging through various channels is the king, then email is the Imperator Romanum, the God-Emperor to rule over them all. Salesforce says that 84% of marketers send commercial or engagement messages over email, and Hubspot says that it’s tied for second place in terms of greatest ROI overall ($36 for each $1 spent). It accounts for 80% of all outbound marketing messaging, Salesforce says.

One in three marketers reports using email and 87% plan to maintain or increase their investment in 2024 though email marketers will need to adapt to emerging technologies and trends such as including targeted personalisation, personalised images, directions to the nearest retail outlet, social feeds, and social media links.

Scrollable Video - the seo killer?

We live in the age of the short-form video - Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok. According to Hubspot, “marketers are doubling down on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to address younger audiences going right to social video platforms to search and engage with brands, even more so than search engines.” 50% say they will be using TikTok this year - and hopefully the US Government doesn’t set a dangerous precedent by banning it outright.

Aja Frost, Director of Global Growth at HubSpot says, “use social listening tools to understand which low, medium-, and high-intent questions prospects and customers are asking, then work with the Social Media team to create content answering those questions — or, even more powerfully, enabling brand advocates to answer it for them.”

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C is Not for Cookie - Third-Party Data

As Google seeks to phase-out third-party cookies and data collection, marketers need to walk the privacy versus personalisation tightrope ever more carefully. First-party data collected via opt-in (such as an email list) is the most powerful kind of data - as it directly captures and fuels the personalisation mentioned earlier. That’s not to say a complete view of a customer is a given either: 2021 Gartner® Cross-Functional Customer Data Survey, 14% of organisations achieve a 360-degree view of their customer, and of those 14%, 44% said it’s in a customer data platform.

75% of marketers are still investing in third-party data, 68% say they have managed to fully define their strategy to shift away from gathering this information.

AI is a co-pilot, not autopilot

AI hasn’t led to marketing being automated completely - but it has shown its usefulness in reducing administrative tasks through automation for marketers. Hubspot says marketers are saving three hours per piece of content and two and a half hours per day overall. Interestingly, only 6% say they use Generative AI to write their content for them; 45% says it helps with idea generation and inspiration, and 31% they use it to create outlines. 81% of marketers say that leveraging generative AI enhances their roles.

Salesforce says 68%% of marketers have a fully defined AI strategy, up from 60% in 2021 and 57% in 2020. The top three ways marketing organisations use AI is to automate customer interactions (90%), automate data integration (89%), and personalise the customer journey across channels (88%).

Most marketers say it’s the number one tool for research, with apps like Albus assisting with in-depth and tangential research into various topics. Of course, as AI isn’t perfect, we must always trust but verify.

What’s Next?

With AI speeding up the cycle between marketing and sales, it’s likely that further automation will further blur the distinctions between the two, especially with targeted and opt-in personalisation. Can you argue with an AI generated image of you wearing a dashing pair of sunglasses and is 40% off for your birthday? Only time will tell.

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What is AI Hallucination in Copywriting?

Though Generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT have become commonplace in business and in copywriting, not is all as it seems. 

If you spend enough time using these tools such as ChatBots or online content generation tools, the AI may produce results that are bizarre, make no sense, or are completely made up.

This phenomenon is known as “AI Hallucination” and can prove damaging for professionals in creative industries such as content writing and copywriting. Here’s what copywriters and other creatives can do about it.

How Generative AI works

Generative AI doesn’t “think” like we do – in a nutshell, the AI manipulates numbers to reach a desired outcome.

Though the language it generates is human readable and appears fluent, it is predicated on a series of tokens broken down into probabilistic models. If one provides a prompt “Write the next word in this sentence: The cat sat on the ___?” 

The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) will parse that phrase like a game of Family Feud – the survey – or information it is fed, will produce the response of the highest probability according to the data it can access. To do this, it lends certain words and phrases different probabilistic weights – The cat sat on the mat. “Mat” may be weighted with near 100% probability while “laptop” may be weighted with 10-15% probability.

It “learns” this through analysing millions, if not billions of words and sentences pulled from various online repositories.

The AI does not and cannot “know” the implied meaning of the words it generates in isolation, or even in sequence. It is manipulating numbers and algorithms to produce the “answer.”

What is an AI Hallucination?

Hallucination, a term from human psychology, refers to an individual seeing or hearing things that in reality, do not exist.

Likewise, AI hallucinations present incorrect, inaccurate, or logically inconsistent information as factually correct and complete information – and being confident that the returned result is indeed truthful. 

The term “AI Hallucination” has been around since at least 2018, when Google authored a paper on Neural Machine Translation, where they said “NMT systems are susceptible to producing highly pathological translations that are completely untethered from the source material.”

Many Generative AI models are trained to provide answers at almost “any cost.” Given an AI is plugged into vast reservoirs of already-existing information at all times, it is hard to understand how an AI can “not know” a given answer when asked a straightforward question. Therefore, it simply produces something, rather than nothing.

In fact, OpenAI disclaims hallucinations by warning users that “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.”

Other terms for AI hallucination are “confabulation” which can appear in AI-generated video, upscaling, images, or audio as weird artifacts or odd interpretations of prompts.

Common types of AI hallucinations

The most common types of AI hallucinations that can creep into copy are factual errors or inconsistencies in the output.

The most famous example is from February of 2023. Google’s Generative AI Bard stated that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope took the very first pictures of a planet from outside our solar system.

Astronomers quickly pointed out that this was incorrect.

It can also contradict itself and not be “aware” of the contradiction. You may ask the AI to write a 26-word poem with each word starting with a corresponding letter of the alphabet, and it returns 25 words or 27 words. Even when “challenged” it may insist that the output conforms to what the prompt has asked.

Other (more fun) hallucinations are when the AI goes completely off the rails and returns gibberish or nonsensical data. You may ask for an explanation of the water cycle, and it goes off on a tangent about 80s horror films. In French.

This can all happen due to the quality of data being collected, how it generates responses, how well a prompt is engineered, and plain old human error in the form of bugs.

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AI hallucinations and copywriting or content writing

With the right prompts and skill, a LLM or Generative AI can produce massive amounts of content at scale.

However, the downside is, at least for the moment, is that AI generated content lacks the “Experience” ingredient in Google’s page ranking factor model, known as E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.)

If a Generative AI “hallucinates” once or twice per 1,000 words, this can make even the most well-intentioned content run afoul of Google’s E-E-A-T parameters. 

If a human website copywriter cannot determine whether the AI has hallucinated or not (e.g. through a lack of expertise on the topic being covered) it can wreak havoc not only for their SEO efforts but also for productivity. 

Copywriters and editors will need to redline and fact-check each claim a Generative AI has made. For shorter copy and content (under 1000w), there is a reasonable chance that writing the post oneself would take less time than crafting prompts and checking facts.

How to prevent AI hallucinations

Though we can’t totally stop an AI from hallucinating, we can take steps to mitigate the risk of hallucinations occurring. This can come from writing better prompts or feeding it higher quality information. 

Pre-train the AI

The “PT” in GPT means “pre-trained.” We may assume that a GPT is adept in all things but feeding it relevant and contemporary data first can help limit factual errors. These may come into play by asking a GPT to read through several hand-picked sources or databases before generating text.

Give it a role to play

Image generative AI such as DALL-E and Midjourney are called upon to “Imagine” images based on prompts; and GPTs can be given roles to play which can narrow its focus to certain types of data. For example, if you want an expert to determine whether the James Webb Telescope did indeed see an extra-solar planet, you can ask it:

You are an astronomer who works at NASA and concentrates on reading telemetry from the James Webb Telescope. Has the telescope ever seen a planet outside our solar system?

Exclude certain answers

Just like the dark days of the pre-Google internet, search operators were crucial to find relevant information. If you wanted to look up “bicycles” you may have had to Ask Jeeves (literally) “Bicycles NOT motorcycles”, which would exclude motorcycles from your results.

This could take the form of:

Provide a list of islands in the South Pacific which exist in the real world. Exclude all fictional mentions and return what can be seen on a contemporary (2010s onwards) map. 

Forgive its trespasses

If the GPT has racked its neural networks and databases and come up with nothing, let it know that that is also an acceptable answer.

Does nothing unreal exist? If you do not know, say, “I don’t know.”

Copywriters: trust, but verify

As of 2023, hallucination is part and parcel of using Generative AI. As a copywriter or content writer who may look to GPTs for ideas, long-form content generation, or productivity improvements, we need to rely on the old political maxim: trust but verify.

There’s a high probability that the GPT output is factually correct, but we also need to cross-check with third-party reputable sources before publishing; lest you contribute to spreading misinformation unwittingly.

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The State of Digital Marketing in 2023

AI, TikTok…what’s next? Digital marketing seems to be so evolved it barely resembles this time last year. In a new report by Hubspot has taken a snapshot of the state of digital marketing in 2023. We all know about the advent of artificial intelligence - but is it all its cracked up to be? Is short-form video still effective? Will budgets increase or decrease in 2023 and 2024?

Drawing on other trends and sources on digital marketing, let’s have a deep dive into the State of Digital Marketing in 2023.

Artificial Intelligence and Automation

According to Hubspot’s report, the average marketer works on five campaigns at a time, and a total of seven campaigns per quarter. Using AI to automate certain processes makes business sense to gain more productivity with less time spent on admin and busywork. Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E are proving to be useful in generating ideas, creating templates, and churning out content at scale. However, the time savings may be offset by the limitations of GPTs which are prone to repetition, “hallucination”, and limited in scope.

First Party Data

Notice how “big data” died suddenly and without warning? With Apple and Google both tackling the problem of terrible user privacy with new features that restrict the tracking of data from third-parties via cookies - and users taking matters into their own hands with AdBlockers and the like - gathering first-party data will be the boon for marketers wishing to personalise and target content to their audiences. 86% of marketers told Hubspot that that data privacy changes have impacted their overall marketing strategy over 2022. Giving users control over their data by opting in to newsletters, shopping accounts, and other data capture methods such as surveys, yields a sense of trust and an opportunity to create value in the often hidden transaction of harvesting user data.

The Rise of the Short Video

Instagram Reels is just YouTube Shorts for people who don’t like TikTok. Whatever the platform may be, short form videos are reigning supreme for marketing in 2023. (Especially the tarted up AliExpress tat hawked by people in sweatpants - but that’s a discussion for another time.) 21% of marketers are going to be investing in short form video, and ad revenue from the format is set to surpass $10 billion (USD) according to Woosuite. Research by Wyzowl shows that 91% of businesses are using video and 73% of consumers prefer to watch a short-form video to learn about a potential purchase. 90% of those businesses that are using video has helped them generate leads.

Mobile Friendly Design

According to SimilarWeb, 57.36% of Australian web traffic is consumed on mobile; the present and the future of the web will be mobile optimised. That means optimised designs, user experiences, and even instant apps will be in-demand among users - and businesses. Though desktop designs may look great, the chances are your customers are scrolling with their thumb, not their index finger.

Sliding into DMs

“Sliding into DMs” or direct messages over social media was once describing a slick romantic gesture - and businesses want the romance between customers to blossom as they use social media to directly interact with customers by answering questions, handling complaints, and general interaction. Hubspot says 30% of younger (Gen Y and Z) have bought products on social media over the past three months, thanks in part to direct message customer service. Using AI chatbots and other automation can help start the conversation with humans taking over when things get too complicated for the machine to handle.

Authentic, Organic SEO

When downturns occur, people look for authentic, organic content. Not paid advertorial but something they can connect with and feel good about reading. Hubspot says that 7% of businesses will cut their ad spend during recessions and bottom-out business cycles - but that doesn’t mean you should skimp on your organic content that improves your SEO. Though marketers may do this as a business-building exercise, B2B and B2C companies should be thinking of investing in SEO content that isn’t engineered to hard sell, but connect with customers while taking home the added benefit of improved Search Engine Results Pages. That means providing real value for their reader - not so much top of mind, but strong of heart.

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What is Artificial Intelligence Optimisation (AIO) Writing?

There’s a new buzzword/acronym floating around the writing space at the moment, and it’s the “AIO writer” - the Artificial Intelligence Optimisation writer.

Some sites are saying that the advent of the AIO marks the death of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) writer - and at this stage, there is merit to the argument.

What is AIO writing, and will it really kill the SEO writer?

What is AIO Writing?

AIO writing is a bit of a misnomer. AIO writing is more like AI editing - taking the output from an AI text generator and editing it up to make it seem as if a human wrote the piece itself.

The business model is to have an AI write a blog or webpage in mere minutes, have a human AIO specialist massage the content so it bypasses any potential AI-detection algorithm (the kind that can scuttle your hard won SEO) and appears as if a human wrote the entire thing itself.

HOW AIO WORKS, IN THEORY

If you are an SEO content writer, the usual process is to write an article that caters to a certain search term, keyword, or keyphrase.

The aim of this is to provide expert-level, authoritative and trustworthy content so it ranks higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a user query. The higher the ranking, the more likely it will be clicked on, resulting in more traffic for the site. For business or commercial sites, this forms a crucial part of their digital marketing.

Instead of an SEO writer writing the content from scratch, the initial ‘draft’ would be generated by an AI algorithm. This can take minutes instead of the hours in which a human would usually complete a draft.

As discussed in a previous blog, “ripping and posting” AI content can potentially harm your SEO efforts. An AIO writer (or editor) would “massage” the AI content so it has the superficial appearance of “experience” - the Google PageRank metric that AI struggles to replicate in its writing.

The AIO writer could also edit the work so it has a consistent tone of voice, is free of glaring copy errors, and/or factual inaccuracies.

However, it could be argued, that any veteran SEO writer would not need to edit their own work to a significant degree. In the three hours an AIO writer shapes a 2,500 word AI-generated article so it’s worthy of PageRank and human eyes, a deft writer could have written the article itself with the editing process resembling proofreading (fixing grammatical or spelling mistakes) instead of substantive copyediting (making stylistic or editorial changes to the piece, e.g., removing entire sections.)

A human writer could also have made critical decisions when it comes to linking to other authoritative sources, instead of shoehorning them in after the fact.

The POTENTIAL Limitations of AIO

It would seem that my job is caught up in a “rapidly developing, uncontrollable technological system” as the thinker Jacques Ellul would say.

However, the fact I just (rather shamelessly) name-dropped an obscure technological thinker from the late 20th Century also shows the limitation of AIO writers. If they are mere editors, over a long-enough timeline, all AIO writing will sound, feel, and read the same.

AIO writing as a bonafide “profession” may also be a flash in the pan. Google and other closed-source detection algorithms may become so sophisticated they will ferret out AIO content from the “real thing” and end up penalising “cheaters” who take the easy way out.

Ellul said “every problem generates a technological solution; computers breed ever larger, more fragile, and vulnerable systems. But the solutions raise more and greater problems than they solve.” His disciple, the incomparable media ecologist Neil Postman went further: “like all important technologies of the past, they are Faustian bargains, giving and taking away, sometimes in equal measure, sometimes more in one way than the other.”

Like the smartphone revolution in 2007, it “solved” many problems by combining many different technologies into one device. It also had unintended consequences. Mental health problems, addiction, and cyberbullying are now rampant problems caused (at least to a significant degree) by smartphones and “always-on” social media.

The academic Evegeny Morozov in his landmark To Save Everything, Click Here, argues that technology can often be an improvement, and is not necessarily revolutionary in and of itself. Even the once “revolutionary” streaming service Netflix has lost more than one million subscribers.

There is a tendency to view any mass-adopted technology as truly game-changing. I even wrote in a journal article (2011) that businesses don’t use computers because they’re handy; you literally cannot run a business without one and a connection to the World Wide Web. Is AIO in the same category? Would this level of introspection even be possible for AI? Or is that not what we want?

I mean, you can travel by horseback these days, but why would you?

That said, I still wear mechanical watches when many of my friends wear Apple Watches. What does that make me?

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Will Artificial Intelligence Change SEO Copywriting?

If you haven’t taken the AI natural-language dialogue engine ChatGPT for a spin, you definitely should.

It’s astounding how it can take a normal query and reply in a structured, easy-to-understand, and if you didn’t know any better, thoughtful way.

Friends and colleagues have been sending me links to ChatGPT, fearing that this will kill off my livelihood. As an SEO copywriter, at least on the surface, it can produce articles in minutes for cents while it takes me hours and hundreds of dollars of investment later.

With that scary thought in mind, should I learn how to code these machines instead of competing against them?

The written word by a scribe’s hand has been around for tens of thousands of years; we aren’t extinct just yet.

The Limitations of AI-written copy

The irony of logging into ChatGPT is the reCAPTCHA asking if you aren’t a robot. AI cannot access itself, it would seem.

I asked it “How do I optimise my content for Google?” - and it returned a pretty decent list of best-practice SEO techniques. Use H1, H2, etc. headings, use internal and external links, upload sitemaps, conduct keyword research. Couldn’t fault it there.

Then I asked it something more subjective - something that required real-world experience to answer.

“Who's the better Starfleet captain, Picard or Sisko?” If you don’t speak nerd, this is the eternal debate as to whether who is the better fictional starship commander - Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise-D or Captain Sisko of Deep Space Nine and the Defiant in the iconic Star Trek spinoffs.

Here’s where things got interesting; or from my perspective, quite boring.

Its opening line was this:

It's difficult to say definitively who the better Starfleet captain is between Jean-Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko, as it ultimately comes down to personal preference.

That’s not what I asked, ChatGPT. I asked who is better.

It rattled off, in natural-language, how Picard was a level-headed, intellectually curious, and stoic diplomat; Sisko by contrast was an impulsive yet decisive warrior who let his emotions guide him more often than not.

That’s all fantastic; but AI will never ever give you a “straight” answer. So who’s better, HAL? I am unable to tell you that, Dave.

If it was attempting to persuade me one way or the other - the essence of sales - it was doing a pretty poor job.

Fortunately for us mere mortal copywriters, Google has seen the inherent flaw in AI copywriting and adjusted its PageRank algorithm, the fundamental programming behind its search engine, to accommodate.

Preempting the rise of AI - Google’s E-E-A-T

Prior to 2018, Google’s quality index rated pages in terms of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). If a page could demonstrate more of these attributes compared to others, it would rank higher in Search Engine Page Results (SERPs).

In August of 2018, Google added another metric to the ranking system: Experience. (E-E-A-T.)

Google is essentially asking if the writer behind the content has accumulated actual, real-world experience on their chosen topic. Have they actually made Gramma’s Sausage Gravy & Biscuits? Have they actually stood underneath and witnessed the grandeur of the Sistine Chapel? Have they binge watched Star Trek: The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine to truly evaluate whether Picard or Sisko is the better captain?

An AI could have high levels of Expertise (they have the entire internet at their disposal), and in turn Authoritativeness or Trustworthiness owing to prior social proof, high traffic, or user ratings on a particular site.

However, if this high E-A-T site begins churning content written by a machine lacking Experience, their ranking will be soon be diminished in comparison to a site that has a real human that has actually done all the things it’s writing about.

Expertise is also a subjective measure - just because I changed my oil on my car, does that make me a motor mechanic? Hardly. How do I stack up against Star Trek nerds who saw the first television run in 1966 and stuck with it ever since? At the end of the day, it’s for the reading public to decide.

Training and formal education can go a long way to establish credibility as a subject matter expert or influencer - but I can’t sit here and say that I learned everything there is to know about copywriting by attending university. That took independent research, trial and error, informal learning, and practice.

AI copywriting is cheap and fast, but never good

If you’re a business and you’re thinking that SEO copywriting “costs too much” we now have something that can do it for free. But should you use it?

Remember the triangle of value: good, cheap, and fast - you only ever get to pick two.

AI copywriting seems to pick “cheap and fast” each time, every time. That doesn’t bode well if you have high search engine ranking aspirations in the short-term or long-term. AI will always be one step behind human minds doing real and original research.

The Hungarian scholar and author Arthur Koestler once remarked, “true creativity often starts where language ends.” For AI, there is no end to language. It can only regurgitate or synthesise what we feed it.

For now, pioneers will always be flesh and blood; and machines will be playing second fiddle.

SPOILER (RED) ALERT

To me, Sisko is clearly the better captain.

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