Revolutionising the Future: How Kiwi Entrepreneurs are Harnessing Digital Marketing in 2023
I recently attended and spoke at the M2 AI Summit in Auckland, the room was packed with more than 400 entrepreneurs, business leaders and technology enthusiasts.
Apart from closing the event with my thoughts on AI and business, I spent a lot of time just chatting with attendees and other speakers to get an insight into what changes they were planning for the next 12 months in their businesses. Interestingly there were several themes that emerged across pretty much everyone I spoke with:
AI is not the answer, its part of the solution – Without a doubt, the opportunity for operational efficiencies, augmented processes and leveraging generative AI is going to improve and help businesses scale over the next 12 months.
The biggest fallacy, however, is that it is going to do everything for you. Many business owners are buying into the AI software hype; companies that claim they can do everything utilising AI and that the business owner can just hand over the money and reins and that their AI software will do the rest. Like most things in life, if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is!
Digital Marketing is Evolving – When I started in digital marketing (2002), Google Ads had only been running for 2 years. When I arrived in New Zealand in 2009, it was widely accepted that about 80% of the leads for your business (if you were digitally savvy) would come from Google search. Fast forward to 2023 and the ecosystem is more fragmented. You cannot rely on Google alone anymore, social media, video, podcasts and display (programmatic) all warrant consideration and investment.
As we head into a cookieless future (meaning tracking users for marketing via cookies) we need to invest into collecting, organising and utilising our first-party data (the data we collect ourselves).
Search is Evolving – AI is already changing how we access and process information. Google’s once seemingly insurmountable search dominance is under threat. Microsoft are going all in with their investment into AI and are changing the game. Google are also evolving (Bard and their search generative experience (SGE)) and a virtual arms race is on. Exciting times!
Get Stuck In – AI is finally becoming mainstream, the one action point you could take away from this article is to just have a play with AI and get your hands dirty. Interested in seeing what is currently available? Visit www.theresanaiforthat.com and you can see a great curated list. At the very least try Midjourney for image generation and Chat GPT for text generation (now incorporating image generation). You can only learn by doing!’
Our business is currently undergoing a process whereby we are looking at the business as if we were starting it today, forgetting all the legacy systems, processes and thinking we have accrued in the past and creating a world class product from New Zealand. I have personally spoken / interviewed 10s of international agency owners to understand what best in class is in the US and UK, and invested in bringing in world renowned AI experts to help us on our journey. What an exciting time to be alive!
