When you’re concepting and brainstorming and trying to think of that next idea, wouldn’t it be great to bounce around your thoughts with a giant brain well versed in a specific topic?
Well with the magic of artificial intelligence, you can. For example, Facebook Copywriter in MECLABS AI. It’s totally free to use (for now). Here’s where you can find the Facebook Copywriter expert assistant in MECLABS AI:
To give you a sense for what it’s like to chat with Facebook Copywriter and ideas for AI-enhanced social media marketing strategies, here is an ‘interview’ with the expert assistant. The goal is to show you how MECABS AI’s Facebook Copywriter expert assistant can help you with social media copy.
Development and technologies powering MECLABS AI
Can you explain how you were developed and what specific technologies underpin your ability to generate copy?
I am the result of innovative artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, designed to assist and amplify the creative process of marketing professionals. At my core, I utilize large language models, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning algorithms, and cognitive computing to generate, analyze and optimize copy. These technologies provide me with the ability to process vast amounts of data and to emulate human-like writing capabilities.
Can you please explain natural language processing in simple language so our readers understand it?
I’ve been playing a (very small) role in training AI lately. And here’s the approach I took – train the machine like you would a new marketer. So if you’re a new marketer, or an experienced marketer who is simply new to social media, here are eight steps that can help your social media marketing.
But before we dive into those steps, I should mention that this is how I would train someone and create social media a decade ago. While it’s still helpful, marketers have a new way to train and get help with our marketing – artificial intelligence.
We have just released the new Social Media Pro expert assistant in MECLABS AI (MECLABS AI is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa). It can help you with your social media marketing. MECLABS AI is totally free to use, you don’t even have to register (for now).
Expert Assistants drop-down menu in MECLABS AI
And the Marketing Professor expert assistant can train you or someone on your team in the marketing fundamentals. Flint McGlaughlin explains in the video below.
That said, as an avid reader of print newspapers and magazines, I can attest that there is benefit to the old ways as well. If you’re looking to learn the fundamentals of marketing, here are a bunch of articles organized under the key steps for social media marketing.
These articles aren’t about today’s buzz-y social media trends. They are meant to give you ideas and guidance for the fundamentals of social media marketing. And since MarketingSherpa has been reporting on the marketing industry for 25 years, some of these articles are older. But they should all help you grasp these key steps.
Back when I was an undergrad at the University of Florida, our basketball team won in the Elite Eight round of March Madness, meaning we were headed to the Final Four. Right after we won that game, students poured out onto University Avenue. There was jubilation in the street.
And then … all of a sudden … everyone just ran down to the football stadium and tore down the goalposts. (We were a football school at the time, not yet accustomed to basketball success)
It was a very odd moment. No one planned anything. People didn’t even shout out any directions. Most (but not all, let the record show I stayed put) of the students in the streets simply started running together toward the stadium.
Ah, the human animal
Much like a V-shaped formation of birds adjusting down the line to keep the formation tight, or a school of fish quickly changing direction, humans also engage in unthinking, subconscious herd behavior without even realizing what they’re doing.
And this is one of the most powerful drivers behind social media marketing.
Psychologists call this phenomenon social proof, which Wikipedia describes as “where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior in a given situation.”
Do you see what I just did there? Wikipedia is another example of social proof. If enough people agree to a definition of a term — even if they’re not experts — I guess it’s reliable enough to include in this MarketingSherpa blog post.
But social proof has its downsides for social media marketing as well
Now, I’m not the only person to write about social proof in social media marketing. Just search the term, and you’ll find endless articles and blog posts.
However, I noticed a serious dearth of conversation about the opposite of social proof in social media marketing. If social proof works because it shows other people are interested in your brand, the opposite of social proof shows that other people are not interested in your brand. What is the word for that?
Every few years, everyone everywhere stops what they’re doing to watch the BIG THING that is happening, whatever it might be — the OJ Simpson trial, balloon boy or, most recently, last Monday’s (moon-day’s) total solar eclipse.
While it may have culminated in everyone gazing up at the sky Monday afternoon, wearing funny-looking glasses, remember that in the weeks beforehand, they had been looking at and searching for information online.
The question for marketers is, do you just watch these events pass you by, or do you capitalize on them for a little social cache?
Even our parent company, MECLABS Institute, got in on the moon madness and posted our eclipse party on social media.
You know how people chat in the office kitchen about hitting a plateau in their diet and exercise routine? Probably the most likely offender is Linda from HR.
Sometimes that can happen with social media too — you’re on a steady diet of energizing engagement, and then all of a sudden, you can’t get ahead. My co-worker, who runs our social media, and I were just commiserating about how these frustrating plateaus can come out of nowhere — one week, it’s three followers more, the next, it’s four followers less.
As with your exercise habits, the answer to a social media plateau is most likely a change in routine.
If you don’t mind me saying so, mining MarketingSherpa’s content or signing up for our inbound newsletter for ideas is a good place to start. It worked for us, after all.
It doesn’t have to be with us though, of course. Do some searching. Check out different websites or even other businesses’ social media accounts to see what your peers are doing.
However, with my intimate knowledge of our extensive library of content, allow me to guide you to some that might be of assistance for this query.
It’s almost unusual these days to make a purchase before quickly checking online to look at stars, comments and blogger reviews.
A whole industry has sprung up out of our consumer need for secondary validation before each swipe of our credit card or “Confirm Purchase” click.
The people behind it are called, generally, paid influencers. They make capital for their blogs and vlogs from companies by reviewing, vouching for, or generally promoting products to their audience.
While traditional celebrities of various degrees of fame participate in this, microinfluencers, as they’re also known as, are general defined as untraditional celebrities. They’re individuals who work in their category, or are truly knowledgeable, passionate and authentic within it, to be seen as a trusted source of buying recommendations.
A MarketingSherpa chart article that covers this topic, featuring a 2016 study by Experticity, an influencer marketing company, in collaboration with Keller Fay Group and Dr. Jonah Berger, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, discovered that 82% of people are willing to follow an influencer’s recommendation, over the 73% who would follow the average customer’s.
It’s difficult being caught between the “soft” marketing art of social media and the world of hard B2B metrics. That’s where many B2B social media marketers have found themselves, but as social media evolves, it’s coming into its own as a true driver of company revenue.
There are mistakes to be made, though, if you don’t evolve social to its full potential. These mistakes can not only hurt your credibility in the company but also overall respect for social media as well.
Mistake #1. Keeping social media siloed
Social media marketing can be a lot of company and product updates, customer service fielding and not much else — if you let it.
Take the word “social” to heart and reach out to co-workers in other areas to broaden the value social media marketing has — not only for customers but within your company as well. Including other teams in social media efforts will also help internal understanding about its value.
For example, there was a time when the people in positions that like to quantify things in their relation to the bottom line — data teams, CFOs — were seen as the enemy.
Baseline measurements are important, and as social media has evolved, it’s gotten easier to understand how it relates to the bottom line with real, non-“fluffy” numbers to show.
Email marketing is tough. You have almost no time to grab your audience’s attention with a subject line, and even if they do open — that’s when the battle is just beginning.
For those who do open your email, you can’t give them any reason to click the ‘delete’ button, and you have to pique their interest immediately.
One of the best ways to accomplish that is through visuals. Something fun, bright and colorful to catch their eye so that they give the content and copy in the email — no doubt wonderful and scintillating — the time it deserves.
When it comes to visuals, there’s a lot that can be taken from social media. If your company has a strong social presence, start pulling some tactics from there. If you don’t, do some research to see what companies in your sphere are doing on social.
Here are three companies taking those dynamic tactics and successfully implementing them into email:
Tactic #1. Gamify emails to entice readers
Primm Valley Resort and Casino, part of the Affinity Gaming family of casinos, wanted to leverage insights from behavioral economics to create campaigns that would be not only fun, but motivating.
With email, that meant embedding bite-sized games into the experience, allowing customers to play and win prizes they otherwise would have been given for free.
Evans and her team decided to play off of customers’ penchant for playing games to promote events.
“You have to find something that you can measure,” said Brian MacDonald, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, in the MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 Media Center.
“Fortunately for us, in the software business one of the big things that we can measure, especially for the audience I usually go after, is all about them trying software,” he said.
MacDonald explains that if someone downloads a software trial, that tells the team where the prospect is in the buying cycle: “We know that if they’re going to download something, they’re probably pretty serious about it.”
Brian and his team were able to actually link trial downloads people had made to actual social media campaigns that they had run.
“That was really the key — finding the call to action that’s linked to something that’s gated, and we know that they took action,” he said.
By including downloads at key social media touchpoints, Brian and his team were able to measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns.
Aside from just metrics, it was also vital that Brian and his team keep up a continuous feedback loop with customers.
It’s one of those randomly attributed phrases that people throw around in social media: “Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”
We’ve all probably randomly scrolled past that phrase and ones like it a thousand times. But for some reason, reading that today on LinkedIn got me thinking — why do so many brands just follow the status quo for social media when the space is made so that the user can stand out from the crowd?
There are so many different ways to reach out not only to your customers as a whole, but to maybe even excite a niche crowd. Here are three of those ways:
Tactic #1.Pioneer uncharted platforms — go where competitors aren’t
In navigating the competitive marketplace for high-end jewelry, the team at Brian Gavin Diamonds needed a cost-effective method to help them stand out.
At MarketingSherpa Summit 2016, Danny Gavin, Vice President and Director of Marketing, Brian Gavin Diamonds, discussed how the team wasn’t afraid of going somewhere the competition had yet to explore to do that.
This attitude led them to Vine, a social app that allows for six seconds of looping video clips.
“The natural paths of marketing can be more expensive. We turned to social,” he said. “No one in the jewelry business was using Vine. It was a wide-open playing field.”
There’s a reason no one else had dared — six seconds is not a lot of time to tell a story and sell customers.
The team came up with a four-part strategy to their Vine videos to surpass that hurdle:
Don’t oversell
Be true to the platform
Be timely and relevant
Distill
This Vine video follows that strategy by quickly showcasing what the company can do with the caption: “From idea, to design, to the custom engagement ring of your dreams … Brian Gavin Diamonds is a cut beyond brilliant.”
Infographic: How to Create a Model of Your Customer’s Mind
You need a repeatable methodology focused on building your organization’s customer wisdom throughout your campaigns and websites. This infographic can get you started.
