AI: Your Marketing Wingman

AI: Your Marketing Wingman

Apr 26, 2024 | Marketing

The Blue Elephant team spent the day with 300 other digital and social media marketers at Social Next Toronto: The Future of AI in Marketing.

Aside from having a great day together, we took a TON of notes, checked out “selfie-ccinos”, and maybe ate a few cookies.

What the heck is a selfie-ccino?

First, one of the coolest activations we’ve ever seen at a conference……Meltwater, the conference sponsor, offered “selfie-ccinos”. Literally, your face on a cold brew cappuccino.

Using super cool “food printers”, they turned a photo into a selfie in the foam.

Here’s Emily’s!

But on to the conference CONTENT….

Our Top 10 (with two random thoughts…)

 

We sorted through our notes and here are the top 12 things we want to share from the event.

  1. AI doesn’t know how a strawberry tastes. There is still so much involved in our work that only humans can do. Humans understand touch, feel, taste, smell, and sight. Humans have empathy and imagination. If you use AI effectively to automate tasks, analyze data, and generate ideas, etc. you can free up time to focus on creativity and enhance the content.

  2. Your customer promise can (should?) also be your strategy. The promise your brand makes needs to focus on the customer – their feelings and aspirations. It should talk to what your customer truly cares about. Then, that idea should drive all departments and functions.

  3. 95% of your audience isn’t buying right now, especially in B2B, and we spend too much time on the 5%. Build content for the 95%, reminding them of your customer promise and showing how you can make their lives better/easier. Get on their list for consideration NOW.

  4. There were two very different takes on influencer marketing:

    1. it will continue to grow across platforms – including LinkedIn with thought leaders taking bigger roles

    2. it’s unclear how it will grow, especially with the advent of influencers created by AI – will people stop trusting influencers?

  5. AI allows us to create creative, personalized, and adaptive funnels and campaigns, leaving behind the previous rigid funnel model of one-size-fits-all all.

  6. Trays of cookies at 9 am are not just something Cathy thinks is a good idea. 🍪🍪

  7. Spaces online and offline where audiences gather are disappearing. Where do they gather now? Audiences are opting for the “dark social” (blocking tracking from app to app) or joining micro-communities, which makes it difficult to gather data on them. Speaker Sarah Stockdale talked about “whisper marketing” – connecting with specific advocates and evangelists to help you get your message across. Brand evangelism has gone from word of mouth to digital and now back to word of mouth, but now as DMs, texts, and What’s App chats.

  8. Mindblowing stats:

    1. Over 1B users watch a movie length of content on TikTok daily

    2. 463 exabytes (463 million trillion) of data will be created every day by 2025

    3. 55% of GenZ watch super niche content that none of their friends watch. They aren’t sharing content and recommendations.

  9. Get weird and take risks! If everyone is using AI to create content, then you need to be prepared to be “extra” to be memorable. Alexandra Toulch asked us to consider why 14-year-olds creating content in their basement go viral. It’s because they don’t follow rules. They create, PLAY, and have fun. They’re weird. And it works. Brent Chaters from Accenture says we should make sure all our marketing plans include “a budget for lunacy and comfort with risk”.

  10. Google really needs to talk to their marketing team to name their products. Also, Facebook.

  11. Alt-text is important in email messages. Many email systems are using AI to filter out image heavy messages with no alt text in them. (Which is interesting because readers like images to break up the text. And also readers don’t like images because they have to scroll too much to read messages…..marketing is very contradictory sometimes.)

  12. AI isn’t scary or threatening. It’s not going to take our jobs – it makes parts of our jobs easier. As with any tool or device, we need to be thoughtful in its use, and remember that it’s only as good as the people using it and the information it receives. Our job is to review, approve, and verify what AI generates and use it as a springboard, not an end product. For the team members who have hesitated to use AI, “after today’s conference, I’m way less hesitant to experiment with it.”

And we’ll leave you with this thought from Jeff Lancaster from LinkedIn:

Why Do I Need Brand Guidelines?

Why Do I Need Brand Guidelines?

Jan 10, 2024 | Marketing

If you run a business or organization, one of the most frustrating situations you can be in is finding that you are unhappy with how your brand looks to the public.

You may have said, “I’m fine with anything” because you were too busy running your organization to consider how you wanted your brand to look to your customers, only to realize that you weren’t actually happy at all.

Having brand guidelines (also known as brand guides or brand style guides) can help you avoid this WHOLE situation by giving you a basic guide to how your brand should look and sound.

And yes, brand guidelines can be extremely helpful regardless of how big or small your brand is. Here is how.

Keeping Consistent

One of the easiest ways for customers to identify you amongst the crowd is by having a consistent look, feel, and tone. This doesn’t mean using the same images repeatedly, but rather using something similar that shows your audience who you are and what you’re all about.

For example, if you’re a brand that brings comfort to people you may want to use images of people hugging or holding hands and have warmer colours like oranges and reds.

This is a great way to avoid constantly redesigning your content which we know costs more money and time in the long run.

Staying Organized

One way to keep all (or at least the majority) of your creative assets in one place is to have them as links in your brand guidelines. If files aren’t bookmarked on your computer they may fall by the wayside. 

💡Pro Tip: Keep a zip file of the downloaded font on Google Drive then keep a link to it on your guideline.

Preparing Content

While you’re working on your brand guidelines, you’ll need to take a look at all of your creative assets to see how they can fit into your brand. This is the perfect time to prepare social media templates or any content that you think your audience would be interested in. 

Some social media templates that you might want to have include: meeting your staff, future events or volunteer opportunities, FAQ, tips and tricks, client testimonials, services you provide, and special promotions or offers.

What Should Be Included

Your brand guidelines should include these sections:

Target Audience

Who are you targeting? What do you know about your customers in terms of demographics? What are their needs, attitudes, and challenges?

Logo

What are the different versions of your logo? What colours and fonts do they use?

Typeface

What fonts will you be using?

Tone

If your brand was a person, how would they speak?

Visual Tone

When your customers hear the name of your brand, what images do they associate you with? If you are taking your own images, what do you want your customers to see? If you are not taking your own pictures, what stock images will you be using?

Colours

What are your brand colours?

Social Media

What platforms are you using? (If you’re not sure, check out our blog post about choosing the right platforms for your business.) How do you want your social media to look? What messages do you want to send to your customers?

💡Pro Tip: Include your social media templates directly in the brand guidelines with links to your Canva files.

Special Occasions & Holidays

What dates do you want to celebrate throughout the year? Are you closed on those days? Do you have special offers for your customers?

Other

Anything else that’s important to your brand!

Although putting together brand guidelines may seem like more work, this is a tool that can help you be organized, consistent, and prepared, and save time in the long run. It won’t solve all of your problems (we wish it could too!) but it can help you move in the right direction – and the more specific you are the better.

If you want help getting started contact us and we’ll be happy to help!