🦶 ChatGPT healed my foot

Hey 👋

Welcome to Neighbourhood Post issue #55 - easy to implement digital marketing ideas straight through your metaphorical letterbox.

I hope you’ve had a good week.

Today, we’ll be exploring how shifting behaviour influences digital marketing, using my foot as an example.

👉 By the way, if you’ve missed previous newsletters you’ll find them here.

📩 And if you’ve been forwarded this email you can subscribe here.

What Plantar Fasciitis teaches us about marketing 🦶

Let me tell you a short story about how the way we use the internet is changing.

I play football every Thursday.

For the last 6 weeks my foot has been gradually more painful after playing.

I wanted to diagnose my symptoms, so I headed to my GP… Google… ChatGPT:

It asked me a series of questions and then gave me its opinion:

Brilliant.

Plantar fasciitis.

No idea what that is, but how do I fix it?

Back to ChatGPT.

It told me to start by finding more suitable boots.

So rather than head to a website or Google, I asked ChatGPT to help:

I didn’t even click the link to view the boots.

I chose the cheapest on the list, called my local Sports Direct and asked them if they were in stock. They were, so I picked them up 2 hours later.

How on earth would Sports Direct attribute the sale?

I didn’t watch their content.

I didn’t Google the brand name or keywords.

I didn’t visit their website.

I didn’t add anything to basket.

I used the internet, but I didn’t show up on any of their data points whatsoever. With the digital landscape shifting so much, we can often be our own best research.

We forget that in some ways, we’re our own target audience.

When taken with a pinch of salt, we can learn a lot from how we behave.

What videos do we watch on social media?

Which ones do we skip?

Which emails do we read?

Where do we go for answers?

How do we navigate websites?

We find the answers to some of our strategic questions, by studying our own behaviour.

But back to my example - what does ChatGPT mean for our digital marketing strategies?

We need to be ahead of the curve, or you’ll get left behind.

On the bigger picture, I’d priorities these objectives:

1. Brand awareness

2. Brand authority

3. Building community

4. Collecting audience data

Also, research how ChatGPT and other LLM respond to questions in your niche - it could tell you a lot about what types of content you need to create, and how you should position your brand.

That’s all for today.

I’m off to ice my foot.

See you next week.

✌️

What we’re looking at 👀 and listening to 👂

📚 Dan couldn’t put it off any longer and started The Mirror and The Light, the final book in the Wolf Hall series. Standing at over 800 pages it’s likely to be the last thing he reads in 2025.

📺 Lillie’s feeling nostalgic, so is heading back to 2011 and re-watching her way through all seasons of New Girl

Before you go - we’ll never use these newsletters to directly sell you our services, but we’re always here if you need any expertise or support 👍