Decoding Dynamics

📰 This Week in AI & SaaS 📰

• OpenAI partners with Arizona State University. Arizona State University (ASU) is partnering with OpenAI so staff can use ChatGPT Enterprise to explore AI applications for student success and research. This partnership has the potential to revolutionize educational techniques, scholarly research, and administrative efficiency. Read more.
  

• New accelerator for AI-first startups in North America. Google has launched the ‘Google for Startups Accelerator: AI-First’, a 10-week program aimed at North American startups looking to integrate AI into their products or services. Read more.
  

• OpenAI’s Sam Altman is set to raise $10B to build multiple AI chip factories. Altman is in talks with global investors, including G42 and SoftBank Group, to raise between $8-10B to set up a global network of chip fabrication plants to balance the AI chip production supply/demand issues. Read more.
  

• ElevenLabs, a VoiceAI start-up, raises $80M in Series B funding.  ElevenLabs generates AI-powered voices in multiple languages with accents and emotions and is now considered to be a multimillion-dollar startup after raising $80M in its latest funding round, taking its total funding to $101M, led by A16z and Sequoia Captial. Read more.

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Other Tools to Explore:

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Read of the Week: 

The ‘Forrester’s Generative AI: A Pragmatic Guide For B2B CMOs’ report will give you a framework for integrating generative AI into your B2B marketing strategy. From creating a strategic AI-driven marketing roadmap to implementing governance controls to make sure you remain compliant, this research-led guidance will help you wade your way through any generative AI confusion.

Download your copy here. 

💡 Marketing Moments with Mounier 💡

Today, we are going to dive into the world of human decision-making and its impact on marketing. Let’s explore the irrational paths of our brains and how understanding them can transform our approach to marketing. It's all about how we perceive, process, and react to the social world around us – a critical element for effective marketing strategies.

The Essence of Social Cognition:

Simply put, social cognition is about understanding how people perceive and interpret your marketing messages. It's a blend of psychology and behavior, focusing on how we form impressions and make decisions. This understanding is crucial for predicting customer behavior and creating value-driven interactions.

Psychological Priming in Marketing:

• Priming is an unconscious process where one stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus.

• A real-world example is the accidental Starbucks cup in "Game of Thrones," which inadvertently led to massive brand exposure.

• Such instances show how subtle cues can significantly impact consumer perception and behavior.

Understanding Biases and Heuristics:

• Biases are mental shortcuts leading to errors in judgment.

• Heuristics, on the other hand, are quick decision-making strategies.

• Bernie Madoff's scandal is a classic case study of how heuristics and biases can lead to catastrophic investment decisions.

Practical Applications in Your Campaigns:

• Customization: Use social cognition principles to tailor experiences to your customer's expectations and behavior.

• Creative Messaging: Design your marketing campaigns to align with the cognitive biases and heuristics of your target audience.

• Ethical Marketing: Balance the use of these psychological strategies with ethical considerations, ensuring you're not manipulating but rather enhancing customer experiences.

Tactical Takeaways:

1. Understand Your Audience: Dive deep into social cognition to get into the minds of your customers.

2. Use Priming Judiciously: Subtly influence customer perceptions while maintaining authenticity.

3. Leverage Psychological Insights: Tailor your messaging to align with the cognitive patterns of your target market.

4. Balance Ethics with Efficacy: Ensure your use of these tools is ethical, enhancing rather than manipulating customer experiences.

Closing Thoughts: In marketing, understanding the 'why' behind customer actions is crucial. Integrating social cognition into your strategies isn't just about influencing behavior; it's about creating meaningful and resonant marketing experiences. Let's use these insights to better connect with our audience and drive meaningful engagement.

👾 TOFU Quick Bytes: Shopify Teardown 👾

Shopify is an open-source platform that enables users, with no-coding experience, to create online eCommerce websites that allow them to build their brand online, track sales trends, manage their inventory, streamline their shipping, and achieve their business goals. Since its launch in 2006, Shopify has steadily grown its user base to 4.4M, and is now worth $104B. 

Strategy overview:  

• Shopify’s target audience is broad: Any retailer–big or small–who wants to build their own eCommerce website.

• To attract new customers and retain existing ones, Shopify does the following three, key things: 

  • They’ve developed (and continue to develop) a set of free tools that meet their customers needs, and solve their biggest problems. 

  • They create content that’s not only useful (and, therefore, valuable to new and existing customers) but also shareable

  • They’ve set up a plug-in store that enables users to add Shopify plugins to their eCommerce sites, and also plug-ins from other applications, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, for example.  

AI integration 

Shopify is a great example of how a B2B SaaS business can utilize AI to enhance functionality and improve user experience. How, you might ask, let's dig deeper:

• They’ve integrated AI-powered chatbots to handle common customer queries, guide customers through processes, and assist with in-platform tasks like order tracking and returns.
  
  

• They run algorithms to analyze customer data, which they then use to offer their customers personalized experiences, like product recommendations and emails.
  
  

• They also use AI to collect, combine, and analyze their customer feedback with market trends to inform new product developments. 

Performance Analysis: 

• Globally, Shopify ranks 4th among the top 5 eCommerce platforms, with a market share of 11%, and they own 28% of the e-commerce platform market share in the United States.
  
  

• They get 3.5M organic visitors each month, and rank for 1.1M keywords, with their ‘free tool’ keywords bringing in more than 450,000 of their organic site visitors.
  

• Their content has acquired over 230 million backlinks, and their Shopify App Store attracts more than 590,000 organic visitors every month.

How have they achieved all this? 

Critical Teardown:
What does Shopify do well?

• Shopify has done their market research: They know exactly what their target audience needs. They know what their challenges and pain-points are, and they’ve used that intel to develop a perfectly aligned set of tools and a library full of informative content that adds value  to their existing and new customers and builds brand trust.
  

• They create content that’s shareable–think memes, motivational blogs, snappy infographics, how-to-guides, and content about their free tools. Their content gets shared becasue it’s actually useful to their target audience, and as a result, these shares increase their brand exposure and improves audience engagement.

  

  Source

What could Shopify do better?

Shopify is great at communicating what their different subscription tiers include. But, they could be clearer: To get beyond the basics, users need to spend more. That’s standard practice with SaaS, but the basic features that Shopify offer on their lowest tier are… pretty basic. 

Users almost always need to pay extra to get something to work as they’d expected. Paying extra for things like design templates, transactions, domains, and emails can add up. This is alienating start-ups and small businesses that have tight budgets, and could be why just 34% of Shopify customers last a full year on the platform. A review from one of their customers, says as much: 

 If these types of ‘hidden costs’ were more visible, these businesses could budget for the little extras.

Key Takeaways

• Uncover your target markets goals, needs, pain-points, and frustrations by using AI to collect, combine, and analyze customer feedback, industry research, and keywords and phrases. Use these findings to develop specific tools, products, and services that meet those needs.
  Top tip: Build a strong backlink profile by using your free tools to create content: People will always share free stuff!
  

• If you don’t have the budget, resources, or expertise to build a suite of free tools and services, create a suite of shareable content instead. Use the above strategy to create informative and useful blogs, how-to videos, infographics etc… that not only bring value to your customers but also increase your brand visibility and engagement.
  

• Consider partnering with others in, or alongside, your industry, and allowing your customers to utilize other apps, products, or services, in tandem with yours: It’ll make their lives so much easier which, let’s face it, is all anyone wants. If you don’t do it, they’ll find another product or service that does.
  

• Be upfront and transparent about what your pricing tiers offer. If your product is good enough, people will budget to pay for the little extras. If they discover they need to spend more to get what they consider to be ‘the basics’, you’ll lose their trust, and more importantly, their loyalty. 

What campaign or content marketing strategy would you like to see torn apart, next time? Let me know! 

Andrew’s Final Thoughts

In wrapping up this edition of Turing's TOFU, we've journeyed through the landscape of AI and SaaS, witnessing partnerships like ASU and OpenAI set to redefine education, and ventures like ElevenLabs breaking new ground in VoiceAI. Our dive into Shopify's strategy and the exploration of social cognition underscore a vital truth: behind every innovation, every strategy, lies the profound understanding of human interaction and behavior. As we move forward, let’s carry the insights from today into our strategies tomorrow, blending technological prowess with a keen sense of our audience. Until we meet again in the next edition, keep harnessing the collective power of AI, SaaS, and human-centric marketing. Keep it smart, keep it human.

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