The Future of AI in Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing today has a few pillar verticals that every startup & brand out there should consider incorporating if they haven’t already. It goes without pulling out a random statistic about how social media is helping businesses sell more, that it does actually matter a ton.
Index
A. Today’s Social Media Marketing Strategies:
- Content Creation
- Paid Advertising
- Influencer Collaborations
- Engagement
- Hashtag Utilization
- Analytics and Monitoring
B. Future Social Media Marketing Strategies & Reasoning:
- AI-Powered Personalization
- Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)
- Voice and Conversational Marketing
- Blockchain and Tokenization
- Synthetic data-driven Content Creation
- AI & Building Deeper Communities
Most Common-Best Practice Social Media Marketing Strategies today:
Social media marketing is essential for businesses of all sizes, and there are a variety of strategies that can be used to achieve success. Here are a few of the most effective social media marketing strategies for 2023:
- Content Creation: Creating engaging content that is tailored to each social media platform is essential for building a following and driving traffic to your website.
A good example of this is Starbucks’ Instagram campaign to promote their Pumpkin Spice Lattes (PSLs) during the fall season. Starbucks creates a set of at least 15 tweets and 10 Instagram posts each year for the PSL season, which includes a mix of UGC (such as employees posing with PSLs), posts about fall-related topics, and video content. This formula has worked very well for Starbucks, and other businesses can learn from their success.
2. Paid Advertising: Promoting posts to targeted demographics on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can be a great way to drive sales.
A recent study by Statista found that the average small business in the United States spent $10,000 on digital advertising in 2022 and that digital advertising is 3.5 times more likely to generate customers than traditional advertising.
3. Influencer Collaborations:
Partnering with social media influencers for brand promotion can be a great way to reach a new audience and build credibility. A good example of this is Gymshark, one of the biggest sportswear brands today. Founder Ben Francis collaborated with key fitness influencers, such as Nikki Blackketter and Lex Griffin, to propel the brand’s visibility on Instagram and YouTube.
This strategy birthed the ‘Gymshark Athlete Community’ with an outreach of over 20 million.
To stay relevant and innovative, Gymshark later ventured into TikTok, launching campaigns like the “66 Days to Change Your Life” challenge, targeting a fresh demographic and promoting engagement.
4. Engagement: Responding to comments, messages, and mentions to maintain an active presence and foster community. A great example of someone who could be considered a great marketer in this context is Greg Isenberg. Greg developed a ‘3D business model’ - DIY (Do It Yourself), DWY (Done With You), and DFY (Done For You) - for building several 7-figure brands.
The model effectively diversifies revenue, appeals to various customers, and fosters community depending on the need of the hour/ your ability to commit to your brand. For instance, at Boringmarketing.com, they implement DIY through courses and tools, DWY through guided assistance, and DFY through full-service SEO solutions. Read more here: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1668631374574632960
5. Hashtag Utilization: Using popular and relevant hashtags to enhance discoverability. This was the go-to discoverability hack at one point but the impact that these have on the algorithm today isn’t as significant as a result of over saturation and #Hashtagspam.
6. Analytics and Monitoring(with tools like HubSpot):
Tracking performance metrics to adjust and optimize strategies. There are a plethora of tools that help you do this today even outside of native social media app analytics, inclusive of platforms like Hubspot. HubSpot is a central platform for social media marketing management, offering tools to schedule posts, track their performance in real time, and produce customizable reports specific to set KPIs.
A key feature is its lead attribution, which can trace conversions back to specific social media campaigns. The platform promotes continuous optimization by allowing businesses to swiftly adjust strategies based on performance insights. Furthermore, HubSpot integrates seamlessly with numerous tools, ensuring a comprehensive analytical view.
In the realm of social media marketing analytics and monitoring, competitors to HubSpot include platforms like Sprout Social and Hootsuite, which also offer integrated tools to track, analyze, and optimize social media campaigns.
Potential future Social Media Marketing Strategies & Why this might actually be worth considering:
- AI-Powered Personalization: AI is definitely having its mainstream moment right now — this is around the 5th time that AI has gained in popularity.
Source: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/history-artificial-intelligence/
One of the key differences between the current wave of AI adoption and previous waves is the development of conversational AI interfaces. Conversational AI interfaces make AI more accessible and easier to use for everyone.
Examples of conversational AI interfaces include chatbots, virtual assistants, and voice assistants. These interfaces allow users to interact with AI in a natural and intuitive way, using language. This makes AI personalization more accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise.
AI personalization is already pretty tangible in companies like Netflix and Amazon, in the context of AI for movie/product recommendations — I think that works as a phenomenal upsell. Amazon reportedly attributes 35% of all sales to its recommendation engines, and Netflix on the other hand attributes savings north of $1 BIllion to its recommendation engines that prevent users from churning.
2. Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR):
While they’re still the new kids on the block, VR and AR are already causing a ruckus in the ‘strategies to watch’ category. Brands, and not just any brands, we’re talking the Burberrys of the world, are pouring cash into this. Burberry introduced a Google Search-based Augmented Reality (AR) tool, allowing users to visualize products in their environment, enhancing online shopping experiences. This innovation is part of Burberry’s strategy to enrich luxury consumers’ pre-purchase journey.
The future could also see Virtual Product Placement (VPP) integrations (need a quick 101 on VPP? Here you go) as VR begins to dominate everything from work to shopping, whether it’s D2C or SaaS — just imagine sitting on a work call & then getting ads for the nearest Croissant joint.
3. Voice and Conversational Marketing: The rise of smart home devices and voice search indicates a transition to voice interactions. Google currently reports that 27% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile. Here’s a few fun ideas around voice & conversational marketing:
a. Creating Branded Skills/Actions: Develop specific tasks for platforms like Alexa or Google Assistant to assist users with brand-related queries.
b. Optimizing Content for Voice Search: Tailor content to answer the conversational and often local nature of voice searches, like “nearby restaurants.”
c. Interactive Voice Ads and Chatbots: Engage users in two-way conversations, either through promotional messages or AI-driven chatbots on platforms.
d. Integration with eCommerce: Allow for voice-command purchases and re-orders, simplifying the shopping process for frequent buyers.
4. Blockchain and Tokenization: Customer loyalty programs on-chain have been a huge theme of discussion and early experiments include Tacobell & Starbucks amongst others.| The image shows a customer having to purchase a PSL to unlock one of the Odyssey program NFTs.
Source: https://x.com/dberlind/status/1698691634337063276?s=20
Airdrops to fans who interact with company social media & hype campaigns might be another way to leverage tokenization for tangible goods.
Giving customers ownership over rare items or gamifying winning items in general via blockchain is an interesting avenue. However many might see blockchain as an incremental innovation as opposed to a radical one — this depends fully on how transformational loyalty on-chain can be in the context of costs to scale, And only proceed if you can truly abstract away the poor UX that currently (2023) exists in the crypto space — otherwise this would’ve simply led to unnecessary friction & eventual sales churn.
5. Synthetic Content Creation in UGC Experiments: Leveraging AI to facilitate the creation of synthetic content, reducing content production costs and time. UGC content has brought about up to 200% growth in a brand’s ability to sell & being able to create target personas and effectively execute an AI/real human-looking video campaign is definitely not far in the future.
Synthetic content is content that is created using AI, rather than by humans. This can include text, images, videos, and audio.
AI-generated synthetic content can be used to create a wide variety of content, such as blog posts, articles, social media posts, product descriptions, and even marketing campaigns.
One of the key benefits of AI-generated synthetic content is that it can be created much faster and more cheaply than human-created content. This can lead to significant cost savings and time efficiencies for businesses.
Another benefit of AI-generated synthetic content is that it can be personalized to target specific audiences. This can be done by using AI to analyze customer data and identify individual needs and interests.
Early experiments around this can be seen on platforms like Synesthesia which a lot of folks tend to use to send out more personable human-like sales emails. I can only imagine that in the future we could have completely AI-generated street interviews, home walk-through videos & beyond.
6. AI & Building Deeper Communities:
Notably managing groups to sell to hasn’t yet taken off in a meaningful way.
Imagine a world where communities are not just segmented by region or interest, but where AI-driven systems understand the nuances of every individual within these groups. It’s like local cooperatives, where communities band together for common purchases, but now brought into the modern age and tailored for each household.
Platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, and Discord have laid the foundation. But what’s next is that the rise of AI in community engagement will revolutionize how we interact online. No longer will you receive generic, template-based replies. Instead, AI will craft responses so tailored, they’ll feel as if a real person typed them just for you.
Another avenue for AI & community management is sentiment analysis. Today folks use tools like Brandwatch to gauge social media sentiment in real-time & more recent iterations of this can be seen on platforms like Loris.ai offering real-time empathy training based on sentiment.
Lastly, think of your online journeys, from browsing social media to shopping. AI will make these experiences even more personalized. Drift AI is an example of a platform that combines conversational marketing, sales, and service into a single platform. It integrates chat, email, and video to provide personalized experiences with AI throughout the entire customer journey.
In essence, the future of community management hinges on AI’s capability to decode individual nuances and proactively address user needs, ensuring interactions are both meaningful and efficient.
In the great words of an entrepreneur who didn’t want to waste time reiterating everything from the above, ‘the future is bright’.
Let us know other cool marketing strategies you’ve seen out there on joel@crowdpad.io!
