@tjrobertson52

Digital marketing as we've been doing it will be completely obsolete within two years. And this has huge implications for small businesses. So what do I mean?

I mean, any task that US digital marketers were doing before ChatGPT will be completely obsolete by 2027, with one exception that I'll get to. I wanna talk about how I know this to be true, how we've come a lot farther than most people think in the last two years. How digital marketing is likely to work in two years from now.

I honestly think digital marketing has been more disrupted by AI than any other industry. But most small businesses and a lot of digital marketers have been really slow to realize this. And most people think of using AI for digital marketing, think about going to ChatGPT and asking it to write a blog post.

And in 2023, that's about all it was. It was a fun toy to get some ideas and generate some rough drafts. However, for us digital marketers that have been keeping up with it, it's become much more than that.

My workflow is already 80 to 90% different than it was before ChatGPT. These days, the first thing I do when I get a new client is I set up a series of AI workflows just for that client. Each of these workflows is gonna involve a custom GPT or a Gemini gem or a cloud project, if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Don't worry. In short, it's a large language model like ChatGPT. That has access to all the information I have about the client and brand, along with specific instructions for one specific task.

So, for example, each client has a brand ambassador. This is just an AI that can answer any questions about the client for me so I don't have to keep bugging them in emails about something they said on a meeting three weeks ago. It has access to everything online known about the client, everything ever said in the meeting that we've had, and everything we've ever created for him.

Then I have another project specifically for creating blog posts for this client. It knows how to write in the client's brand voice, which web pages to link to throughout the blog post, what calls to action to include. Along with just best practices for writing blog posts.

I have one for creating web pages using their template. I have one for creating video hooks and scripts. I have one for coming up with Backlink Outreach Strategies, one for writing press releases.

Some of these workflows also involve deep research with AI or other AI tools that might generate assets or designs. These do take a while to set up, but when they're done right, you can just print high quality marketing materials for a brand on demand. And over time, I can improve them.

And that improves the process for all my clients. Now, a lot of people are busy trying to automate systems like this. So far this has felt like a waste of time for me.

But I do think the software is just getting to the point where it's gonna make sense to start automating more. And that brings me to my point. Already hundreds of companies are working on software that small businesses could use themselves to handle these processes.

Now, at first this software is not gonna be as good as having these workflows built custom for your brand, but it won't be too long before they're pretty close. Take Facebook ads for example. Right now you definitely want to pay a professional to run a Facebook ad campaign for you.

I think within one to two years, running an effective ad campaign is gonna be as simple as giving Facebook your website and a budget. And from there it'll be able to automatically generate high performing ads and creatives specifically for your brand and offer. So what does digital marketing look like in 2027?

I think for businesses could have a budget of less than 1 to two thousand dollars a month. It's just gonna be software. For a couple hundred dollars a month, you'll be able to pay for software that does as good of a job, if not better than the average digital marketing agency could do today.

If your budget is in that 2,000 to 20,000 dollar range, I think you are gonna Wanna Hire someone or a team of people to build custom work clothes for your brand, but it won't make sense to hire an agency to handle it for you. At least not what we think of today when we think of an agency. So what was that exception I mentioned earlier?

Well, if you have a huge marketing budget, if you're Coca Cola or Nike, I probably still won't do as good of a job as the best humans in 2027. So if you can afford to hire a team of some of the best copywriters and designers in the world, sure, you should keep working with an agency. However, my guess is that most agencies around today are gonna have to survive either by completely changing their business model or by hoping their clients don't figure out they're getting ripped off.

So make sure you're paying attention. I'm not sure if there's anything to do today, but if your agency isn't keeping up, you might wanna think about pivoting.