Can Chat GPT make your marketing strategy for you?
Marketing Professor, Mark Ritson defines strategy as the answer to three things:
- A target (segment) you’re going after
- Your positioning to that segment
- An objective you want to achieve
Great, so let’s see what Chat GPT can do using Medium.com as the example to make this more tangible.
First, targeting
In order to come up with a target, we need to work out the segments in the market first.
Creating segments
We aren’t looking for the target just yet. Here I’m trying to survey the market first, see the chessboard, then pick the target for maximum effect.
🤖 Ok so, let’s ask Chat GPT:
It picked up on something I didn’t really think of before — there are two markets.
One market of Medium is the readers themselves whom the company can sell the membership. The other is for writers, who are needed to provide the content.
Can we get any detail on the size and value of the segments?
Darn, these are big numbers, and not very specific. But let me round this up:
I think there are some cool ideas here.
There is a difference between a company user and individual, for sure. I also like that they noticed an educators segment.
General consumers was a bit of a cop-out, but I can understand that. It doesn’t have access to Google search, after all.
As for the readers, I’m not sure how you would identify ‘high quality content readers’ over others.
🤓 If I had to try this myself, I’d make sure these markets are split: writers and readers. Let’s focus on the writers.
For the writers, a quick Google search shows there are 31.7 m bloggers out there.
I’m going to skip the corporate part of the market. I’m guessing, a corporate blogging platform is beyond the scope of what Medium.com could change itself to.
(Though there could be potential. There are lots of crypto blogs on here?).
So how many folks make money already from blogging?
The article found above also shares that about 24% of people make at least $100 — $1000.
Can we go any deeper than this?
I wonder if Similarweb.com can give some clues.
Interesting, but I’m not ready to divide up the market by subcategory yet.
Hold on- thinking about it now, it seems like perhaps fiction vs non-fiction makes sense.
It looks as though non-fiction topics are likely more popular here. I haven’t really seen much/any fiction work on Medium and that may be a segment to consider.
Finding the distribution is not easy.
Doesn’t look like there’s much data to support this idea. Scratch that.
💡 Meanwhile, I found this infographic by WP Promote, sharing some of the main blog categories:
(So about half the blogs are music related? What about political blogs?)
I’m going to super roughly group them here and say that about:
- 5,759,000 of those blogs were about technical things. Law, technology, business, etc. Roughly 20%.
- 21,485,000 of those blogs surveyed were lifestyle related. Music, fashion, pets, beauty, pets, etc. Roughly 80%.
Thinking about this, I think I probably make this divide.
A blogger from those two groups could more likely be motivated differently. E.g. I suppose for lifestyle, it’s about monetizing your passion. For technical topics, perhaps it’s about something else?
Ok, so here’s my go of it:
Let me name these example segments:
- Thought Leaders: Technical bloggers who make income.
- Influencers: Lifestyle bloggers who make income.
- Commentators: (like me) technical bloggers who haven’t made money yet.
- Journalers: Lifestyle bloggers who haven’t made money yet.
Ordinarily, I would like to do some more research into the groups and their individual behaviors.
But for this post, let’s play along with some assumed characteristics that I’m going to make up as we go.
Targeting choice
🤖 Now I’m asking Chat GPT, which segment would you target and why?
Hmm, Chat GPT is suggesting a mass-market approach.
While it may be harder for the real Medium.com, without unlimited resources, but there are strong arguments in favor of mass marketing in modern times popularized by Professor Byron Sharp.
Also, they’ve pointed out there’s some spillover from professional content creators.
I wonder though, who is the main competition to Medium here?
A few thoughts that come to mind:
- WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, e.g. create your own blog
- Substack, Ghost
- Twitter, Social Media platforms
Is Medium a strong competitor across all segments?
🤓 What would a human do, then?
Coming back to my previous example segmentation:
I think it looks like Medium has heavy competition from Substack in the Thought Leader segment.
My guess is that if you’re making money from your blog in a technical area, like Politics, you’re probably doing well as an ex-journalist and less likely to divert your attention here.
Influencers and Journalers I could imagine comparing Medium to social media platforms, that offer much faster and easier ‘audiences’. I would say Medium is possibly on par with the competition here (or a little weaker) with the provision of some kind of audience for the actual ‘bloggers’ here, but arguably weaker in terms of having options that these folks might want to monetize themselves through email lists, etc.
Finally, we’re left with the Commentators.
This group actually interests me as a target.
- They possibly care less about the affiliate or email-friendly features that those in the lifestyle segments want.
- Would find it harder to get an audience on other social media platforms, like Instagram, because technical topics might not lend themselves as well to visuals.
- Substack could be a little intimidating commitment as you’d need to publish regularly or else your list goes stale. Arguably less of a factor here? I’m not sure.
In which case, I’m going to go with targeting Commentators.
Ok, now to positioning
According to Smart Insights, brand positioning is:
“Brand positioning involves enhancing the positive differentiation your brand offers against competitors and the perception of value in your customers’ minds.”
Ok, so basically trying to highlight the difference of your brand strategically against your competitors.
🤖 What does Chat GPT say?
{At this point, my Chat GPT keeps breaking down due to server overload…}
Sorry Chat GPT. We’re almost there…
Ok, it got there!
There are a lot of things included in this positioning. I’m not sure how much it could consider competitors, but at least it has a lot of ideas to work with.
I like that it had different ideas for each segment.
The main message consistent in all of these was Quality Content.
Can we get a slogan to bring this positioning to life?
Almost!
I like “Think deeper with Medium.”
🤓 For me, I’d probably take quite a different positioning.
Having done some snooping around. I found some conversations like this online that speak to Medium’s audience strength to my potential target:
Knowing this, I’d probably try lead into this strength for Medium’s positioning.
I’m no creative, but perhaps some example taglines to compare here could be:
- Medium. They’re waiting to read.
- Medium. Your audience is waiting.
Eh, this really isn’t my strong point. 🤦
Secondly, I’d probably add another element to the positioning statement sharing how getting started with publishing on Medium is easy.
Finally, what objective should we tackle?
The objective was the last part of Ritson’s three-part marketing strategy definition.
🤖 I ask Chat GPT, “Thinking of the marketing funnel overall, what is the biggest objective for Medium.com to address in the next 12 months?”
Some cool stuff here.
Intuitively, I completely agree. User acquisition is a big problem. Everyone wants more readers.
We can’t easily get a read on Medium’s conversion rates but that’s one to think about. Do you recall whether or not it was easy to sign up?
To make things clearer, let’s ask it to make the goal SMART:
Phew, these are some massive objectives.
I have no idea how big the marketing and product team is at Medium but I’m sure they would have their hands full with these.
Having said that, on their own, each objective looks pretty achievable aside from the retention figure. 80% retention of engaged users looks difficult.
🤓 Lastly, from my point of view, I’d probably have similar goals.
Looking at Medium on Similarweb to compare metrics:
Compared to Substack:
Medium is getting 3x the traffic. But the bounce rate and visit duration are similar.
It seems like there are some issues that bloggers are having regarding monetization and the paywall.
To that end, I’m going to guess there is an issue here at the consideration and retention stages of the funnel that need to be addressed.
Without knowing the inner perspectives, I’d put out an illustrative number and say that consideration is about 30% and rention is maybe 20% too.
So a SMART goal for these would be to:
- Increase consideration from 30 to 40%, over Substack, by the end of 2023.
- To increase retention from 20–30% by the end of 2023.
To summarize
🤖 Chat GPT suggests:
- Target everyone
- Position mainly around Quality content
- Aim to improve metrics by 20–80%
🤓 The human example:
- Target Commentators
- Position around having the existing audience
- Aim to improve consideration and retention by 10% in 12 months
Phew. I made it through the test here.
Many thanks to Chat GPT for participating until the end. It was a slog for both human and machine.
For those reading, what do you think of Chat GPT’s answers? How would you have prompted it differently? Are you interested in more AI news and content?