2019 marketing trends prediction: the end of bs
He who supplies the most compelling writing prompts wins
You may wonder if this is another rant about the state of marketing.
Mercifully, no.
I’m sounding the death knell for low effort, low-quality marketing in 2019.
There won’t be room anymore for catchphrases of the year like permission marketing, advocate marketing and other flashes in the pan.
The reason is that marketing automation is about to receive its final piece of the puzzle in the form of Elon Musk’s robot writers.
The AI is so good that researchers are withholding the full version of it out of safety concerns.
This was when I started worrying about my job.
In a world where everyone can get quality copy generated quickly, the winner is he who supplies the most compelling writing prompts.
The OpenAI GPT-2 accepts writing prompts and produces prose. It’s not Shakespeare yet, but I’ll use the available time to get on its good side.
Prompts — and by extension — ideas, will be the currency of future marketing jobs. I will use prompts, ideas and framing interchangeably.
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If you spent much more time on the production of content than on the question of what content is worth producing, you aren’t flexing your ideation muscles.
Use it. Be the Dwayne Johnson of marketing ideation. Juice that prefrontal cortex for robot-crushing inspiration.
Like working out, this practice takes time to get going. Unlike working out, it gets more fun the better you are at it.
As you feed the next article prompt to your robot writer in Microsoft Word VR for fleshing out into a lead magnet, you’ll wonder how it took you so long to get started.
If I did my job well, you would be wondering how I ideate better and stay above GPT-2 in the employment food chain. Without that, I could be talking about “content marketing” again for all you care.
You can put your pitchfork away for now. I am getting to the good part.
I can’t supply you with ideas, but I can supply you with the filters that sieve the bad ones out.
Here’s a sample of cognitive biases that all humans are programmed to respond to:
Wikipedia has a full list of known cognitive biases. Applying just a few of them to your marketing would be a big plus.
As you create new writing prompts, article titles, social media posts, think about how these ideas may be received by your audience. Even though GPT-2 is doing the writing, the audience are still humans.
Even if GPT-2 can write about the difference between 2 credit cards, it needs to be told that we are writing for a hypothetical middle-class family of 4 that drives a Honda MPV and prioritizes cashback rewards.
My favourite example of framing was for a bedding company client. This is what we did.
Your average bed costs S$500 and is used for 10 years. That is S$0.14 per night.
Given how important good rest is, how much we crave sleep every time we roll out of bed, how many dollars would we pay so we can feel refreshed every morning? A movie ticket? A Big Mac?
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This framing and others like it saw my client bag a 70 per cent increase in sales year-over-year.
We used the science. Your mileage may vary.
Before you say “well this doesn’t apply to me because I work with Google ads, Facebook ads, or SEO”, let me connect some threads for you.
The ad platforms require text for all ad formats. Even banner ads are not exempt from having to say what they are about.
In SEO, we have been told that the clickthrough rate (CTR) is a search ranking factor. If I consistently have a higher CTR due to my more attractive page title, I would obtain a superior result (often, not always).
Are you glad that this didn’t turn out to be yet another low effort marketing predictions for 2019 fluff piece?
Did you notice that I’ve been using some of the cognitive biases that we share to improve your retention?
Your 2019 is already off to a better start for having spent this time. Long may it continue!
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Wei Leen is the founder of Digifone.sg, a B2B phone plan comparison service, and a marketer with a love for psychology.
Image Credits: kzenon
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