The definitive guide to digital and AI

🤖 Is this a human or Robot?

Author

Dan Preston
November 10, 2023

Hey 👋

Welcome to Neighbourhood Post issue #7 - easy to implement digital marketing ideas straight through your metaphorical letterbox.

We’ve been together as a team this week. We’re remote-first but every month we spend two days in the office together.

Anyway, this newsletter is all about AI 🤖

I could have asked AI to write it, but I’ll tell you why I didn’t in a minute…

👉 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.

How to get the best out of AI 🤖

My job didn’t exist when I was born.

It didn’t even exist when I graduated from university.

Facebook was there, but not for businesses. Instead, it was a place to share your intellectual thoughts and ground-breaking ideas.

Case in point:

Marketing has always progressed at a ruthless speed. If you think you’re standing still, you’re actually moving backwards.

So don’t let the emergence of AI make you fall behind.

How should you incorporate AI into your digital marketing strategy?

First up, something I’m bullish on; the human vs AI.

Let’s get one thing straight. The future if marketing is fully AI.

However, the present of marketing isn’t. At this moment, the human still has the advantage.

Your audience craves innovation and expects quality, and AI can’t currently compete. It wins on scale and quantity, but not on performance.

Let me put it another way.

Someone recently said to me: “AI is the death of manual content production. Anybody can ask ChatGPT to come up with 10 ideas, blogs and captions, and ask Midjourney to come up with 10 images.”

That isn’t the death of manual content production. Why?

Because the fact anybody can do it is the very reason you shouldn’t.

Social Media is saturated with mediocre posts, and with AI that’s only getting worse. The way to success is creating something that’s very obviously human. Something that AI couldn’t create. The brain is drawn to the compelling, to the novel and to the exciting, and the God-given creativity installed in us currently has the edge.

I once heard someone make an amazing point:

“If you couldn’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it? And why should your audience?”

🔥

This will change in the future, and we should be ready for it. AI will be able to beat our human capacity to innovate, but let’s not mistake that moment for today.

OK, we all agree now?

Great. In that case, how should we use AI to improve our digital performance?

2 things: efficiency and perfection.

Efficiency - AI can’t currently rival our marketing ingenuity, but it can beat our speed and passion for mundane tasks.

Lean on AI to help speed up some basic areas, such as:

AI is very good at research. I actually used it to research craft beer places on a trip to Edinburgh. 🍻

Use ChatGPT to suggest competitors, summarise their USPs, pull in their social media handles and URLs, document the number of their followers, and much more. Tell it about your audience and ask it to tell you 5 objections they might have to converting.

Perfection: As well as making processes shorter, it can improve your finished product - taking it from 90% to 100%.

Start with your human brain, then when you have something crafted to near-completion, get AI to make it even better.

One example is asking ChatGPT for help.

The prompt I find most helpful is:

“You are the best [X] in the UK. Using the top 5 best practices for [X], read this [X] and suggest 3 things I could improve.”

For example:

“You are the best copywriter in the UK. Using the top 5 best practices for email copywriting, read this email and suggest 3 things I could improve.”

The future is undoubtably AI.

It’s only going to get more powerful.

In my opinion the biggest improvement it will make to digital is in data analysis.

Very soon you will be able to ask “what is the conversion rate of my website, measuring only traffic from social media for the month of October, and how does that compare to 2022?”

And it will instantly come back with your metric. Maybe that already exists?

In the distant future it will change the way we watch content.

Every series and film will be AI generated - no one will watch the same thing. You’ll ask “Create me a 6 part series of 30 minute episodes that has a storyline like Game of Thrones but has an ending as good as Breaking Bad.”

And it will create it for you.

And on that note, let’s leave it there.

I’d love to know how you’re using AI to improve what you’re doing.

Let me know.

✌️

What we’re looking at 👀 and listening to 👂

📺 Dan’s been working his way through “Only Murders In the Building”, with a superb Steve Martin renaissance. Series 1 is great. Series 2 & 3 are OK.

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 👍