AI Digital Marketing – Perspective of a seasoned marketer

I have been listing a few new year AI digital marketing articles to read. I am simply awed with the sheer numbers published. After reading about 25 of them with great attention, care, interest with an intent to learn, my top three are:

1. 10 DIGITAL MARKETING TRENDS YOU NEED TO KNOW FOR 2020 – Michael Brenner
2. 42 Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2020. – Nidhi Dave
3. Marketing Trends for 2020: Here’s What Will Happen That Nobody is Talking About – Neil Patel

This is a trend that I have observed over the past few years. Every domain gets tonnes of  “new year” articles that are published across every nook and corner of the internet. All of them are written very well, no doubt, and the effort taken to create such listicles is enormous. I love to read them year on year, especially those in my domain – digital marketing.

I read through each of those 25 with deep concentration and deepening concern. The end result is that I am really, really tired of them. Do you know why?

1. Many of these articles are recycled, the old one from 2018 is recycled and published in 2019 and then recycled again and published in 2020..! I mean how glorious does that sound?
2. As a result, they have the same information, most times and little more added to it. Has originality gone out of the window?

The best part is that all of us want to get indexed on the search engines and all that bots understand is text and a little more, a little variation here and there would get us through. What about the consumers, the visitors, the readers, mates? What about them?

Search engines are not paying us, visitors, consumers, readers are! Have we forgotten that, and what will you achieve putting stale food on the table? The table is what search engine props up, but the food needs to be fresh and different.

I will not go into any domains apart from mine and with all due respect to all those authors, AI digital marketing gurus and consumers and visitors out there, I write this with no malice towards anyone or an intent to criticize. And, this is what I found.

a. Let’s take a peek at the article a, listed out on top – “10 DIGITAL MARKETING TRENDS YOU NEED TO KNOW FOR 2020”. First, the capitalization of the heading puts me off, tells me that someone is shouting at me. Micheal Brenner’s perspective is very good and the quality of writing is just awesome. The article lists out 10 trends, where CX [Customer Experience], Employee Engagement, Visualization, Personalization, Tracking SERP positions, Voice Search, Customer retention and loyalty and live video which are all old concepts rewritten as new.

For example CX, employee engagement, visualization, SERP tracking, and customer retention and loyalty have been in practice for over 4 years now. Personalization, voice search, and live video are the stuff that we marketers have been practicing for the last three years or so.

We are left with Strategic marketing transformation that has been the underlying rule for all marketing practices and too generic, prevalent at all times. The only new trend is AI-based automation which is just entering the deployment phase and is not perfect.

Inference – I, as a marketer has learned nothing new, from the piece after spending 15 to 20 minutes of reading. Of course, budding or aspiring marketers could learn something, only if they are not on their toes practicing and learning every day.

b. In the article b listed above – “42 Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2020”, Nidhi Dave has put across 42 beautiful marketing techniques that are not only old but also work. Of these, apart from Artificial Intelligence, Augmented reality and Neuro Marketing, the rest are all old concepts that we marketers always follow.

All those three are not perfected yet, so the options we have are all limited as of now. The beauty of this piece is that each of the 42 points is very well explained with illustrations and links to other resources. A very good piece all in all for marketers who are just entering the fray and not so much for the more seasoned ones.

A let down for me since I have been there and done that. Imagine, this took me more than an hour to read and at the end of it, I learned too little to write home about.

c. The article c listed above – “Marketing Trends for 2020: Here’s What Will Happen That Nobody is Talking About” by Neil Patel is expectedly the best of the lot since it speaks about AI digital marketing trends in 2020 and not so much about what and how to pursue the trends.

However, it does form a foundation to build upon our strategies after due diligence and research depending on the domain that we work in. However, it is a much shorter insight than expected. Where I come from, I am seeing personalization going off the marketing horizon by 2024 where AI takes on the mantle.

Interesting articles all of them. More interesting is that only article a, has the date of publication as 25th November 2019. Rest have no production dates or expiry dates.

They have been published a tad too soon, I guess since no one mentions Google’s January 2020 Core update or the crumbling of cookies or new methods on monetization that are in vogue.

I think we are all basking in the shade of old memories and writing memoirs. Being proactive is an essential quality of marketers, no need to write diaries but there is no harm in sharing experiences, that’s how the marketing community grows, harmoniously where everyone makes a worthy buck.

As for me, at efficaci, we have come up with some highly revolutionary ideas in content marketing and the application of artificial intelligence in AI digital marketing practices. In fact, we are already working hard on a few cloud-based apps that will bring about a change to the entire marketing landscape.