THE WORLD ENDS TOMORROW AND WE HAVE THE SALVATION
Social media can cure anything but diseases they generate.
6/6/20264 min read
Perhaps the most toxic thing about social media is the tone of most posts, especially commercial ones, which mixes apocalypse with end-of-year sales. With each new video, story, or reel, there's an illustrious unknown who has found the cure for online retail, lack of customers, difficulty in measurement, or the use of AI to solve all their problems, including sleep and hair loss.
In this sea of miraculous solutions, which has transformed Instagram into a steroid-fueled 1406 with AI-powered videos, who are we? Those who have already found the solution too, or those who feel lost, condemned to the end of times?
There isn't a single business manager today who feels absolutely at ease with their choices, it's true. There are so many revolutionary tools, with and without AI, that will change the way you manage your business that it's difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. So, I'm going to play my role as a good Samaritan and help reduce your anxiety with some useful information.
Today, the biggest challenges of Growth Marketing are the following:
GEO - many companies still haven't even managed to optimize SEO enough, and now GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, or optimization for Generative AIs, is emerging. The effect doesn't yet have a direct impact on sales, but this impact is growing by leaps and bounds. Those who aren't monitoring GEO will have work to do to make up for lost time. Not to mention that SEO is also changing…
Google Search - in the wake of the growth of AI and GEO, Google has drastically changed the way it searches, including the interface with the help of AI. This changes everything: SEO, Google Ads, GEO, etc. If before it was necessary to understand what the user was looking for, now it is necessary to understand the context that leads them to search in order to be the best answer for the AI. So, it's not enough to understand what the user wants, but to create prompts that deliver your brand to the AIs.
Google Ads - to deliver your brand within the new context, Google is drastically changing the format of campaigns. If context becomes mandatory and AI mediates search and result, the ads have to communicate with both. So, it's necessary to know which campaign formats will prevail, such as Demand Generation.
Analytics - if the Search and Ads duo is changing, Analytics isn't lagging behind. Delivering users and pages is no longer enough. It's necessary to understand what the user does on the site, what they need, and what will make them come back. Therefore, the entire measurement strategy needs to be reviewed.
Sales Funnel - with all the changes in the acquisition process, the Sales Funnel is beginning to include components that didn't exist before: campaign contexts and themes, content delivery, AI prompts, personas, and pain points… The truth is that the funnel is becoming more of a flow and less of a funnel, since the user's path is no longer unique. We will talk less and less about conversion rates at each stage and segment these results.
UTMs - tracking user access to the site is becoming increasingly sophisticated and intelligent. I believe UTMs need improvement, but it's a standard accepted by several tools.
Universal Shopping Cart - the model introduced by Google changes a lot, especially in consumer goods retail. Once Google can read your cart and suggest products, it closes the cycle of the acquisition process. Is your e-commerce prepared for it?
And what is the role of AI in all this? To date, we can define the possible increase with the use of AI in 3 phases, which represent understanding, implementation, and scaling:
Using AI to understand your ecosystem and how it works. Understanding business needs is still an attribute of the business area, and IT doesn't always understand what is most important.
Developing tools using AI to automate or integrate acquisition steps. Often the need is very specific, or the results are means to an end. So, incorporating these tools helps, but timing is crucial.
Using AI tools to manage some stages of the process. Today, the greatest productivity gain is in tools that already have AI at their core and deliver results far beyond traditional tools. Lead management, GEO, prompts, ads, and SEO must be done with tools that have native AI.
But there is a crucial step that comes afterward, and this step doesn't have a single formula. It begins when making the entire system work in an integrated way to fully understand the results, but the greatest benefit comes when optimization is done by AI. The process of understanding the decisions and what needs to be done to improve is much faster when done by AI. In addition, there are many variables at the same time, and not all of them have a cause-and-effect relationship, but rather a correlation.
The key is to create an automatically integrated process from campaign to sale, defining performance KPIs and goals. When the KPIs are well defined; they serve as the benchmark to be measured, and it's not necessary for AI to define what needs to be done: it's up to AI to experiment with all variables and point out the impact on the KPIs, at least initially. Once the relationship between each adjustment and the results becomes clear, that can also be automated. Until then, I recommend that a checklist be implemented that makes adjustments and reports the results to the manager for evaluation and to reach the necessary conclusions.
So, how ready is your company?