From new social media platforms to AI-powered tools, the digital marketing landscape is ever evolving and it can be challenging to understand what tools work best for specific sectors and audiences.
AfriconEU, the first Trans-continental Networking Academy for African and European Digital Innovation Hubs in partnership with African Technology Business Network (ATBN) hosted an online webinar on “Digital Marketing in the Age of AI”.
The webinar introduced participants to the current Digital Marketing landscape and equipped them with the basic tools to develop a digital marketing plan for their business or organisation. The webinar also covered the benefits and challenges posed by AI for digital marketing. The main speaker, Francine Beleyi, CEO at Nucleus of Change, is a personal branding specialist with vast experience helping organisations to develop their digital strategy and increase visibility, trust, and profitability.
You can watch the webinar here.
The 3 key takeaways from the webinar are summarised below:
Takeaway 1:
- Build a powerful online brand
In this digital age, business leaders need to move from being spectators who are always chasing opportunities and becoming players who create and attract opportunities. As a business owner, you need to be active and visible online and build a purposeful brand for your business. Francine shared her story of how she invested in resources to gain knowledge on developing her brand. She has put her discoveries and successful strategies in her book: “Personal Branding in the Digital Age” .
Takeaway 2:
- Digital marketing is crucial for every organisation:
Francine defined digital marketing as the leveraging of online channels to achieve your marketing goals. She shares key reasons why digital marketing matters for every business or brand:
- Digital marketing is cost-effective and provides increased reach and visibility.
- Provides measurable results and analytics.
- Provides enhanced customer interaction and engagement.
Francine then introduced participants to the digital marketing landscape and its various elements as shown in the diagram below.
She further provided participants with guidelines for creating an effective digital marketing strategy and how to select the right digital tools.
The 5 Steps to create a digital marketing strategy are:
- Determine your business objectives stating clearly what you want to achieve.
- Identify your audience and what they need.
- Look for how you can fulfill both your objectives and your audience’s needs.
- Create a roadmap to guide you to achieve your objectives.
- Select the tools which will help you achieve your objectives.
Selecting the right digital tools for digital marketing largely depends on your objectives. For instance, if your objective is to increase brand awareness, you must consider tools that will help you reach a large segment of the target audience.
- Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tiktok are used by many businesses to reach and engage with their audience. You can consider any of these platforms for your business.
- You can also optimise your website for search engines like Google; this way when someone uses the search engine to browse for topics related to what you optimised your website for, your business’ website will be displayed as part of the top search results. This makes it easy for customers to find you and patronise you.
- Again, another tool that can increase brand awareness is content marketing. Content marketers write blogs, make videos, podcasts, infographics, e-books, and related content to educate their target audience on whatever topic they are interested in.
See the picture attached for more ideas on which digital tools can be used for your different business objectives.
Takeaway 3:
- AI is a gamechanger in the digital marketing field
AI has impacted how work is done in the digital marketing industry. Previously, it could take a human graphic designer about 3 hours to generate an artwork, meanwhile, AI can do the same job in a matter of seconds. AI tools like ChatGPT have transformed content marketing. Chat GPT is used by writers to generate manuscripts for their writing needs. By engineering the right prompts using relevant keywords, ChatGPT can generate write-ups to suit your marketing and other business needs. Francine went on to emphasise to participants the importance of providing the right prompts to optimise ChatGPT outputs.
Francine gave an example of engineering a prompt for ChatGPT such as:
Bad prompt: Write a review for the book “personal branding in the digital age”.
Good prompt: Write an informal review for the book “personal branding in the digital age” focusing on the framework YEANICC described in the book and the case studies.
Conclusion
As the digital marketing landscape keeps evolving, creating a good personal brand is a powerful way to market your business. Every business owner must prioritise digital marketing to be able to reach a much wider target audience. As AI is rapidly changing the way things are done in every industry, business owners need to be proactive to take advantage of this transformation.
Watch the complete session on YouTube to learn more about Digital Marketing in the age of AI.
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