Recently, I had one of those days at work—the kind that makes you quietly question your vocational choices while staring into the middle distance. Nothing specific triggered it. No catastrophic email. No single catastrophic meeting. Just a deep, gray funk where everything in your life gets held up to the light for inspection, and most of the conclusions are… unkind.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that these days tend to show up when I’m feeling stuck. What I lovingly refer to as SSDD scenarios (Same Shit, Different Day). They’re often accompanied by brief but vivid fantasies of pulling a full Johnny Paycheck on the way out the door.

Fortunately, my rational mind has matured with age. It turns out I enjoy having a place to live. And food. Regularly.

We all hit moments when life just feels heavy. Sometimes it’s stress. Sometimes it’s an outrageous workload. Sometimes it’s the added insult of disliking the work that makes up that outrageous workload. And sometimes it’s the slow dimming of passion for something you used to love.

I’ve dealt with the Fuckits several times in my life, and because of that, I’ve learned to ask myself a few grounding questions:

• Today is just a moment in time. There is never only this moment.

• Is a mental health day in order? Preferably one that includes a long walk to dump the head trash.

• When was the last time you ate? And no, coffee doesn’t count. Are you hydrated?

• Can you do your job from somewhere else today—another office, a café, anywhere that changes the view and maybe the narrative?

One of my long-running personal challenges has been the belief that I should be able to operate at 100% every day, on every task. That belief is bullshit. Some days I’m firing on all cylinders. Other days it feels like I’m phoning it in and hoping no one notices. Ideally, my average trends toward productive, but I’ve learned that variability is normal. Nobody runs at 110% every day without consequences. Burnout isn’t a moral failure—it’s a math problem.

I also work hard to maintain a decent work/life balance. My job matters to me. I believe I do good work. I like thinking that I make a positive difference for people. But I also have children. And friends. And a significant other. And a cat box that will not clean itself. And sleep.

I’ve also been reliably informed that watching an hour of television once in a while will not cause the universe to collapse in on itself. (I’m still testing this theory.)

The point is: work/life balance isn’t a luxury. It’s maintenance. It keeps you healthy and keeps you engaged. Familiarity can absolutely breed contempt and sometimes stepping away from your obligations is exactly what allows you to rediscover why you cared in the first place.

Now, none of this is to say that your relationship with your job hasn’t legitimately run its course. Maybe there are no challenges left. No learning opportunities. Maybe the bulk of your stress comes from navigating a manager or coworker who seems hell-bent on making everything harder than it needs to be. If that’s the case, your next step toward bliss might be… finding a new bliss.

But before you torch your job—or your relationship—in a fit of pique and run off to the wilds of Maine to build a hand-crafted shelter with no electricity or running water, take a beat. There is no such thing as a perfect life without Fuckits. At some point, that cabin in the woods starts to feel suspiciously like work too, and suddenly your fantasies involve indoor plumbing.

Most of all, remember to breathe. Meditation—formal or otherwise—can be an effective way to unclog your head and reset your perspective. It doesn’t magically fix everything, but it can remind you that what you have isn’t terrible. It’s probably just a little out of balance right now.

And balance, like most worthwhile things, is something you keep revisiting—not something you achieve once and never think about again.

If this resonated, you’re not alone.

Feel free to reply, leave a comment, or just sit with it for a bit. Some ideas don’t need fixing—they just need noticing.

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. To learn more, check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available.

Small businesses aren’t struggling because they lack technology.

That may sound counterintuitive in a moment when every software vendor on earth is promising that artificial intelligence will revolutionize your business before lunch, but the evidence says otherwise. Most SMBs today have access to more tools than they know what to do with. CRMs, marketing platforms, automation software, analytics dashboards—and now AI layered across all of it.

And yet, many still stall, stagnate, or quietly fail.

The reason is simple and uncomfortable: tools don’t fix direction. They only accelerate it.

AI, in particular, is brutally honest in this way. It amplifies whatever intent it’s given. When that intent is clear, grounded, and realistic, the results can be impressive. When it’s vague, misguided, or copied from someone else’s playbook, AI simply helps businesses move faster in the wrong direction.

This is where the idea of Human Advantage matters—especially for small and mid-sized businesses.

At their best, SMBs have something that large enterprises spend years trying to manufacture: proximity to reality. Leaders are close to customers. Decisions are informed by lived experience rather than abstract dashboards. Tradeoffs are felt immediately, not buried in quarterly reports. That human context is not a liability to be automated away; it is the very thing that makes AI useful in the first place.

Strategic judgment is a good place to start. Every business decision involves tradeoffs—between growth and risk, speed and quality, ambition and credibility. AI can suggest tactics endlessly, but it cannot decide which risks are acceptable or which outcomes actually matter right now. Those decisions require human judgment informed by accountability. When SMBs outsource that judgment to AI, they often end up optimizing activity rather than progress.

Context matters just as much. Small business leaders carry knowledge that never shows up in data sets: the unspoken objections customers raise on sales calls, the promises marketing can’t safely make yet, the operational constraints that define what’s possible this quarter. AI infers from patterns. Humans operate from experience. When those two are aligned, AI becomes powerful. When they’re not, automation simply magnifies confusion.

There’s also the issue of trust—something that’s far easier to lose than to measure. Brand voice, tone, and credibility are not just aesthetic concerns; they’re signals that tell customers whether a business understands them. AI can mimic language and structure convincingly, but it doesn’t care if the message sounds hollow or overconfident. Humans notice. Customers notice faster. In SMBs especially, trust is not a marketing asset—it’s a survival mechanism.

None of this is an argument against using AI. In fact, the opposite is true.

AI is exceptionally good at speed. It removes friction from early-stage thinking. It produces drafts, variations, and ideas quickly enough to keep momentum alive in small teams that are perpetually short on time. It also excels at spotting patterns—surfacing competitive insights, content opportunities, and performance trends that would otherwise go unnoticed. Used well, it gives SMBs the ability to explore more options before committing scarce resources.

Operationally, AI offers leverage that used to require agencies, consultants, or additional headcount. It summarizes, restructures, repurposes, and automates work that once consumed disproportionate energy. That control—paired with faster iteration—can be transformative.

The problems arise when SMBs confuse execution with strategy.

Letting AI “decide” often produces work that looks polished but lacks relevance. Automating before clarifying goals results in faster misalignment. Copying enterprise AI playbooks introduces unnecessary complexity that small teams can’t sustain. These failures are rarely technical; they’re conceptual.

The healthiest model we see emerging is a simple one. Humans set direction by defining goals, audiences, constraints, and risk tolerance. AI generates options within those boundaries. Humans then curate, decide, and apply judgment rooted in reality. AI refines and scales what works. Humans remain accountable for outcomes.

At Gravity Clamp, this principle shows up again and again across industries and use cases. The businesses that succeed with AI don’t surrender control to it. They use it to move faster after they’ve decided where they’re going.

The line that matters is this: AI accelerates decisions. Humans own consequences.

For SMBs navigating uncertainty, that distinction isn’t philosophical—it’s practical. The future doesn’t belong to businesses that automate everything. It belongs to those that understand what should never be automated at all.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it’s still available to learn more.

About a year ago, I sat down to sketch out a new business plan—one centered on helping marketers make better use of emerging AI tools. The idea was simple: combine my more than 35 years of experience in digital marketing with a practical exploration of AI products. It felt like the right moment. The tools were exciting, the momentum was real, and the curiosity was everywhere.

That exploration eventually became Gravity Clamp—a consultancy and training practice focused on helping marketing teams use AI intentionally, not impulsively.

What I discovered early on, however, was something both obvious and often overlooked.

Despite the explosion of available AI tools - quite literally thousands of new ‘solutions’ have popped up during the past year, the thing most marketers are struggling with has very little to do with AI itself. The real gap is strategy.

For the past eight years, much of my professional focus has been on teaching digital marketers how to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud. At first glance, that may not sound as flashy as generative AI or autonomous agents. Marketing Cloud is largely about email and text messaging—channels that have been around for a long time. But there’s a reason platforms like this endure: they are built on fundamentals that haven’t changed.

At its core, effective marketing—whether powered by AI or not—comes down to three essential activities.

First, collecting and organizing data in a way that allows you to define and understand your audiences. Second, determining the most appropriate channels and messages to reach those audiences. And third, measuring the results of those efforts to determine whether your goals are being met.

That third point is the one that deserves the most attention.

Goals are the backbone of any meaningful marketing effort. Without them, activity becomes noise. Campaigns become motion without direction. So it’s worth asking some uncomfortable but necessary questions: Why are we doing this? What outcome are we trying to create? What action do we want people to take? And how will we know—clearly and objectively—whether this effort worked?

We’re not launching campaigns because we’re bored. We’re not sending messages because there was extra budget left at the end of the quarter. We’re doing it because there’s a business objective we’re trying to support—revenue, retention, efficiency, or growth.

AI tools can be extraordinarily helpful in this process. I use many of them myself—for research, ideation, and accelerating content creation. But there’s a hard limit to what these tools can do. AI doesn’t understand your brand strategy. It doesn’t know your internal constraints. It can’t determine which trade-offs matter most to your business.

AI doesn’t replace thinking. It amplifies it.

This is where Gravity Clamp does its work. Rather than leading with tools, Gravity Clamp starts with strategy: clarifying goals, defining what “success” actually looks like, and identifying where AI can responsibly and effectively support those outcomes. Sometimes that means introducing new tools. Just as often, it means fixing measurement, process, or alignment issues that no AI platform can solve on its own.

Relying on an AI “fill-in-the-blank” solution still requires understanding the problem you’re trying to solve. It’s like walking into a hardware store, buying a hammer, and declaring yourself a carpenter. The hammer may be useful—but without an understanding of structure, materials, and intent, it’s just a tool in your hand.

Marketing works the same way. Tools matter. Strategy matters more.

If you’re curious about how Gravity Clamp approaches AI marketing—from strategy and measurement to training and execution—you can learn more at gravityclamp.com.

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I share this because when I tell you that playing around with some of the latest AI-Driven music creation tools ‘blew my friggin mind’, I want you to know that this is a pretty meaningful thing.

My exploration of AI music tools from the @GravityClamp YouTube channel should speak for itself. If it doesn’t, let’s just agree that ‘fine’ is so far down the road behind us I’m not really sure what to call what I feel right now. Dazed and Mind Blown isn’t too far off. Check it out!

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available to learn more.

One of the most fascinating things (to me) about AI tools is that they really level the playing field. Even if you don’t know how to draw or paint you can be an artist. Even if you don’t know how to play an instrument, you can be a musician. Even if you don’t know how to write you can be a writer.

While we might take a purists POV on things like this and decree that people who create without having the requisite skills are really creating, AI tools really don’t care and will allow anyone who knows how to use them to continue to create just fine.

On this week’s Gravity Clamp YouTube channel, I jumped into the process of creating generative art using Stable diffusion, Dalle-3 and Midjourney to see which tool is the best at making pictures that look like the one’s you’d most like to see.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available, to learn more.

While the report does offer good news in the form of jobs that may be created as the result of AI becoming a central force in our lives, it's also going to result in disruptions to current models and how business is conducted globally.

Last week I took some time to share some of my thoughts on these topics in the attached video. Enjoy!

In this video, I tackle the creation of GPTs (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) using the OpenAI platform in an attempt to create a few AI ‘helpers’ who can help me get more done in less time. At least that’s the theory.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available to learn more.

In any brand’s ongoing quest for business growth and efficiency, the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, serves as a guiding beacon. This principle suggests that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of our efforts. In the realm of business and marketing, this translates to a golden insight: a majority of your profits come from a minority of your customers. But in an era where data is abundant yet insights are scattered, how does one pinpoint this crucial 20%? AI tools and strategies, a formidable ally in distilling the essence of the Pareto Principle to not just find but engage and grow this vital segment of your audience.

The Quest for the Elite 20%

The journey begins with identification. AI's prowess in data analysis allows businesses to sift through mountains of customer data to uncover the golden 20%. These are not just your most frequent shoppers but the most profitable ones, those whose engagement levels signify a deeper connection to your brand. AI algorithms analyze purchase history, customer lifetime value (CLV), engagement rates, and even social media interactions to paint a portrait of your ideal customer segments.

Predictive Analytics

Armed with the knowledge of who your top 20% are, the next step is to predict their future needs, preferences, and behaviors. Predictive analytics, powered by AI, uses historical data to forecast future actions. This is not simply conjecture, but a calculated forecast based on patterns of past behavior, allowing businesses to anticipate needs and craft personalized strategies that resonate deeply with these key customers. Predictive analytics turns data points into a narrative, predicting the next chapter in your customers' journey even before they know it themselves.

Personalization

The power of AI extends into the realm of hyper-personalization. Knowing your top 20% is one thing; engaging them effectively is another. What makes these particular people tick? AI-driven personalization tools analyze individual customer data to create tailored messages, offers, and experiences that strike a chord. From personalized email marketing campaigns to customized product recommendations on your website, AI ensures that your top customers feel valued and understood, enhancing loyalty and increasing their lifetime value.

Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing is another area where AI intersects with the Pareto Principle to maximize profitability. By analyzing data on purchasing behavior, demand, and price sensitivity, AI can adjust prices in real-time for your top customers. This could mean offering exclusive discounts to maintain loyalty or premium pricing for high-demand items, ensuring that you're not just focusing on the 20% but also maximizing the revenue they generate.

Social Listening

Social media is where your customers express their unfiltered opinions, preferences, and dissatisfaction. AI-powered social listening tools monitor these digital conversations, offering insights into what your top 20% are saying about your brand and competitors. This intelligence allows you to swiftly address concerns, capitalize on trends, and engage in meaningful dialogues, enhancing customer satisfaction and deepening brand loyalty.

Churn Prediction

Even the best sailors can't control the sea, and customer churn is an inevitable part of business. However, AI can forecast which customers are at risk of leaving. By identifying warning signs early, such as decreased engagement or negative feedback, you can take proactive steps to re-engage at-risk customers from your top 20%, personalizing efforts to address their concerns and keep them within the fold.

All that said, losing prospects and past customers isn’t always a terrible thing. People who are taking themselves off of your roles might be doing you a favor by simply taking themselves out of consideration because their needs have changed. For example, when my kids were toddlers, I bought them all sorts of toddler swag.  But over time those needs changed. My choosing not to buy toys for toddlers today has zero to do with the quality of the brands and businesses I previously bought from, and had everything to do with my changing needs as a dad.

Lifetime Value Optimization

Finally, understanding and increasing the lifetime value of your top customers is where AI truly shines. By analyzing data across the customer journey, AI identifies opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and enhance the customer experience, turning one-time buyers into lifelong advocates. This not only boosts immediate revenue but secures future earnings, ensuring that your treasure chest—your top 20%—continues to grow in value.

In the modern marketplace, where competition is fierce and customers' expectations are high, the Pareto Principle combined with AI offers a strategic advantage. By identifying and focusing on the 20% of customers who yield 80% of your profits, and employing AI-driven tools and strategies to engage, satisfy, and retain them, businesses can unlock unprecedented growth and efficiency. In this way, the 20% can continue to be refined and can be the cornerstone of your brand’s future prosperity.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available, to learn more.

If I were to ask the average marketer why they are bothering to, I dunno, MARKET, what would that reason be?  For most of us it's the dream of leveraging our time, creativity and money to attract the right people and to increase our brand engagement as leads and customers. 

But despite that fairly universal goal, it's a helluva lot easier to write your dreams down on a marketing plan and a lot harder to actually make those dreams come true.

The simple reality is that nothing amazing happens simply by happenstance but instead requires some good foundations of understanding in order to navigate what can seem like a thick jungle of obstacles that can get in your way. Here are 5 AI tools or strategies that any marketer should be clear about before you even start your journey.

1. Know Thy Audience: The Crystal Ball of AI Analysis

In the realm of marketing, understanding your audience is akin to possessing a crystal ball. But we're not wizards; we're better. We have AI analysis tools that can dissect your audience's online behavior, interests, and engagement patterns with the precision of a scalpel. Imagine diving into the depths of your data lake and emerging not just with numbers, but with stories. Stories about what makes your audience tick, what content they devour in the dead of night, and what sends them scurrying away in disdain. Use these insights to craft content that resonates, messages that matter, and campaigns that compel. It's like reading their minds, without the creepy invasion of privacy vibes.

2. The Personalization Potion: Elixir of Engagement

Once you've glimpsed into the heart of your audience, it's time to brew the Personalization Potion. This powerful elixir, distilled from the raw data harvested by your AI familiars, allows you to tailor your content, offers, and interactions to each member of your audience as if they were the only one. From emails that address them by name to recommendations that echo their deepest desires, personalization makes your brand feel like a trusted friend among strangers. And in this jungle, a friend is a beacon of light that can guide leads right to your door.

3. Predictive Pathways: Charting the Course to Conversion

With knowledge of the present and personalization in your arsenal, it's time to look to the future. Predictive analysis, the crown jewel of AI's capabilities, allows you to anticipate the needs and actions of your audience before they even realize it themselves. By analyzing past behaviors, current trends, and even the subtlest of digital tells, you can predict what your audience will want, need, or do next. And with this foresight, you can create campaigns that meet them at the crossroads of their journey, offering a helping hand (or a compelling product) just when they need it most.

4. The Social Spell: Amplifying Your Call Through the Echoes of the Internet

Social media, a jungle within the jungle, where whispers can become roars with the right amplification. AI tools can analyze trends, hashtags, and the pulse of the digital crowd, allowing you to cast your content into the winds of virality. By understanding what makes content shareable, what times are best for casting your posts into the ether, and even which influencers might ally with your cause, you can turn the social media landscape into fertile ground for your brand's message to grow and thrive.

5. The Feedback Loop: The Cycle of Eternal Growth

Finally, we come to the Feedback Loop, the magical circle that turns end into beginning and failure into fodder for success. AI doesn't just help you reach out; it helps you listen. Through sentiment analysis, customer feedback, and engagement metrics, you learn what works, what wanes, and what warrants a rethink. This continuous cycle of listening, adapting, and improving keeps your brand evergreen, growing stronger with each turn of the season.

In the end, the journey through the jungle of AI analysis tools is not just about finding leads or engaging an audience. It's about building a bond with your audience that's based on understanding, respect, and mutual benefit. So, take up your tools, fight fear, and set forth. The jungle is deep, the path is winding, but the rewards are well worth the journey.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available, to learn more.

For marketers, one of the biggest and most costly challenges over time, has been finding ways to most accurately and effectively find the people they most want to talk to about what they do for a living.

AI, when it’s not actively planning the overthrow of humankind, is all about analyzing data, predicting trends, and offering amazing personalization tools. It's like having a super-smart robot buddy that knows exactly who your audience is and what they want. And they can help do this through the creation of Buyer Personas.

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of our ideal customers. They help us better understand our customers and prospects, making it easier for us to tailor content, messaging, products, and services that meet specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

You could think buyer personas almost like a spy movie dossier. Each offers a breakdown of the personal characteristics that makes these people unique. Using these data points, these different individuals can be sorted into audience segments, along with people who share similar characteristics. When grouped together, it makes it a lot easier for marketers to get the right message to the right people!

Having well defined buyer personas is crucial for any business because without them we don’t have any idea where to aim our marketing. And anyone who believes that ‘everybody’ is their target audience has possibly been huffing oven cleaner.

With AI, marketers can sift through millions of data points in seconds. We're talking about everything from social media interactions to website visits - to find patterns that humans probably won’t be able to spot. This means marketers can now understand customer behavior on a level that was impossible before, and can predict when someone is ready to make a purchase or if they're just browsing. This allows for incredibly targeted marketing that speaks directly to the customer's needs.

For example, let’s say that I wanted to sell more widgets through my ecommerce store. Business has been good in the past but I want it to be even better. Because I have a history of selling my widgets, I also have some data to work with to try to get a better idea of the process or pathways that buyers are using to buy my widgets. Do people just pop into my online store and make a purchase or are there other things they do first? 

By analyzing the data, I’m able to spot a pattern that shows that when people come to my website they often start by watching a video that explains the benefits and uses of my widgets. From there a large percentage visit a page on my site that offers a deeper dive into the technical specs of the widget. A large number of these people also visit my product reviews page which shares industry experts' thoughts on our widgets, also with some positive testimonials from some of our past customers. In fact, over 63% of the people who end up buying a widget follow a variation of this path before finally going to our ecommerce site and making a purchase.

With this understanding, I can redesign my website to create a more streamlined process so I move prospects from the early exploration stage to the tech overview, the product reviews and toward the buying page.

I can also look through my data again and find people who have done all of the steps before making a purchase but haven’t yet pulled the trigger and bought a widget of their own. But with this knowledge I can reach out to these specific people through email marketing or during their next visit to the site to create an offer that sweetens the deal enough to get them to take action.

It’s also worth understanding that most businesses don’t have just a single buyer persona, but could have dozens of them depending on WHY people want to buy what YOU offer. 

It’s also important to understand that not everyone you can include in a buyer persona is in the same place with their needs. For example, the person who just heard about your brand for the first time today is going to be very different from the person who may already be a customer and has an understanding of what your business offers. 

By defining these separate personas ever further it means you can control the message that you share with the newbies, and the one you share with the veterans, to make sure that each is as relevant as possible. Again, there is no such thing as one size fits all anymore. 

The ultimate goal of marketing is to get the right message in front of the right people at the right time. Once you know who the right people are, the rest becomes a lot easier.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available, to learn more.

I've been in the business of creating digital media for most of my career. As a result I've worked with a wide variety of companies and people and have dealt with a number of personalities.  I've worked with people who think that I should be able to create full ad campaigns for a few hundred dollars and those who think that an idea should be able to be turned into a campaign in 24 hours. 

Years ago someone on my team printed out my first glance at what is known as the Iron Triangle in modern biz speak: ‘you can have it good, fast, or cheap  (pick 2)’.

This model (accurately) points out that with any project, if you try to incorporate all three elements you will undoubtedly fail. For example, if your focus is to produce something of high quality quickly, then it will cost you. On the other hand,  if you want something that is affordable and you want it quickly,  quality will suffer. 

The Iron Triangle is a pretty solid reference model when it comes to producing content for marketing too. While it's not particularly hard, especially with the help of AI tools,  to create content,  that doesn't automatically mean that the content being created will fit your marketing needs. In short, using ChatGPT to create text for your new website may seem like a great idea (fast and cheap) but if that content doesn't take into consideration the challenges that your prospects want solved or accurately promote your value proposition or take into consideration, then it's pretty much non-nutritive filler that looks like a website. 

While generative fill tools have their use, without proper context, they're just a glorified party trick. For any content being generated, it needs to include an innate understanding of the deepest needs of prospects,  understand how to encourage them to move toward a desired outcome, and determine the best way of getting from here to there. 

This requires the ability of a marketer to know where they currently are and where they would like to get to long before any marketing tools are even considered.  This means doing research and defining the parameters of any project long before getting started. 

I'm a fan of what AI can offer marketing.  But I'm also a realist. Content that can be created quickly is generally not going to be good quality.  Content that is well researched and focused isn't going to happen quickly. And content that takes time and consideration to create isn't going to be cheap. 

Want to learn more about content creation best practices? Enroll today in our FREE AI Marketing Fundamentals course and join me for 2.5 hours of foundational best practice for using AI tools to move your digital marketing efforts to the next level. Fully self-paced for busy people and totally free. Sign up today!

As someone who has been working in emerging tech for over 25 years, it has occurred to me more than once that I have been forced to learn and then forget years and years worth of knowledge including technologies that are no longer used (remember Syquest cartridges?), software programs that were once the spine of entire industries ( Hello Macromedia Director!) and strategies designed to keep businesses at the top of their game (RIP Reach and Frequency Advertising!).

And while I have often have thought about how nice it would be if technological advancement could just take a holiday so we could catch our breath (especially in the constantly changing world of digital content marketing education), I also recognize that one of the things that drew me to this world in the first place is the excitement of constant change and innovation.

Many years ago, writer and humorist Mark Twain pointed out that ‘the only person who likes change is a wet baby’. This has certainly been proven time and time again in my experience but I’ve also observed that regardless of the nay-saying of people quick to dismiss new advances in tech as a ‘fad’ or ‘trend’, or those who declare loudly that ‘insert name of new technological advance here’ will end up destroying civilization as we know it, that the world and society in general have continued to constantly change anyway.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes on this topic which was shared by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Futureshock, in which he declared, ‘The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

As a longtime technology trainer I couldn’t agree more. And I get it - the fear of the unknown can be scary. Holding on to the known can be comforting. But regardless of how embracing change makes one feel, it is truly one of the only constants in our lives.

As AI technologies change and evolve, especially those we use for digital content marketing, the industry and the world will change as well. Societies around the world that a mere 20 years ago had no knowledge of social media or content on demand, will integrate AI tools and what they can offer (both good and bad) as being part of the new normal. 

Those who choose to dig their feet in to hold onto the status quo will simply end up struggling against an inevitably. Those businesses who learn how AI can help them progress faster and more efficiently will be the businesses of the future.Those that try to remain ensconced in the familiar will be quickly left behind.

To that point, I happy to share that our new marketing training company Gravity Clamp is now open for business. If you’re a marketing professional just getting started in understanding how the rise of AI tools can help your brands get in front of the right people in the future, then we invite you to check out our brand new course, ‘AI Marketing Fundamentals’. This 100% free course offers two and a half hours of guided instruction and exploration (by yours truly!) designed to help content marketers find new paths through AI that can make their marketing efforts more significant in the future. Click here to enroll today!

At the end of the day, change isn’t bad, it can just be uncomfortable. But once that discomfort can be addressed and a new normal emerges then it stops being change, and becomes the new normal. From there we can incorporate all of the new features and potential into our businesses and put it to good use.

That is, until the next big tech disruption. Which will probably happen next week some time.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available, to learn more.

At some point last year, I came across a video in one of my social media feeds that showed a young woman with her face painted to look like a skull, playing a snare drum in a snowy forest. As the video progresses, more and more people join her as they march together through the streets. What I recalled mostly was that it was a visually stunning video and I liked the music.

Fast forward to last week. In a moment of reflection I was thinking about the video and the song and decided to look it up. As has been my go to for the past decade plus, I simply opened a Google browser and started punching in keywords such as ‘skull face makeup’ and ‘marching snare drum’ and ‘music video’. Within seconds I was presented with pages of images and offers to buy drums, music videos with drums in them, children and adults sporting skull makeup, Halloween costumes and plenty of videos of marching bands.  Upon trying to explain to the search engine that I was trying to find a music video with all those elements, I was supplied with even more irrelevant options.

Frustrated, I tried to think back on what I remembered about the content of the video and the band. I recalled (I thought) that it was a northern European band, and then I remembered that it had something to do with the final album that this band was releasing.

Punching this new information into Google yielded pretty much the same bouillabaisse of plentiful but not valuable results. I figured that this was going to simply be a dead end in which I would need to live in ignorance and learn to control the things I can control.

And then a thought occurred to me. 

Opening up ChatGPT, I decided to see if I could find the answer by not telling it what I wanted it to write for me but almost as if I were phoning a friend who might have insights into the origins or arcane and random music videos. Here’s what our conversation looked like:

Me: German band farewell music video

ChatGPT: If you're looking for a German band's farewell music video, there are a couple of notable examples you might be interested in:

• Rammstein released a music video for their song "Adieu" on November 24, 2022. The music video, directed by Specter Berlin, features a plot set in the future, imagining a time when Rammstein has retired. The filming took place in the Palais Garnier and a studio in Paris, France​​.

• Words Of Farewell, a German melodic death metal band, released a music video for their new single "Stories To Forget." This track is part of their upcoming EP, set to be released by Seek And Strike​​.

These are just a couple of examples, and the choice between them depends on your musical preferences. Rammstein's "Adieu" offers a grandiose, cinematic experience reflective of the band's significant impact on the music world, while Words Of Farewell's "Stories To Forget" presents a fresh take from the melodic death metal scene.

Me: Might be a Scandinavian group

ChatGPT: It sounds like you might be referring to the Swedish rock band Kent. They released a music video titled "Då Som Nu För Alltid" (Then as Now Forever), which marked the end of their career. The video includes the dates "16th May 1990 - 17th December 2016," indicating the span of their career, and it concludes with graphics stating "last album" and "last tour." The band expressed their gratitude to their fans for their support, patience, and love following the release of this video​​.

Bingo and holy crap! (and you can see the video here if you’re interested)

At this moment the paradigm shifted for me. Instead of looking upon Google as the place to find anything I want, it instead suddenly became a ‘quaint way of filtering  information into a slightly manageable pile of results largely based on keywords’. While that might be enough for some tasks, this new ‘phone a smart friend’ model was so much cooler and significant.

It also drives home the realities behind Google’s new SGE (Search Generative Experience push and the ability for the Large Language Models to look at the pile of relevant search results and synthesize from it the answer to any search query in a way that isn't based on keywords, but instead of relevancy. 

I suspect that in short order models like ChatGPT lookup and SGE will become the new normal and before long we’ll look back on how Google searches used to work with the same perspective we have recalling really early computers, floppy disk storage or modems. Glad they helped us get here but also glad that we’ve moved beyond that point. 

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. To learn more, check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available.

Last year, after getting laid off from my long time day job, I decided that I needed to get back into the mix and started working with a few different recruiters to find something that would suit my experience and ambitions.

One of the recruiters I worked with met briefly with me to discuss my bonafides for a training role he was looking to fill. We discussed what I could bring to the table along with my rate and he seemed pretty positive we could make this all work. A few weeks later he pinged me to let me know that because the company (a sizable investment firm) had gone over budget in the deployment of the platform I was set to train people on, that they needed to slash the training budget and would I be willing to do the same job for a 30% decrease in pay? After some soul searching, I proposed what I thought was a win-win which included me not being obligated to take on a full time role. The recruiter went away to theoretically discuss the revised proposal and I never heard from him again. 

While a disappointing experience, it occurred to me later that I was simply a meal ticket for the recruiter. He would negotiate as needed to do what he could to place me but if that didn’t work he would find someone else whose services he could sell instead. I was the product. I wasn’t included in the loop beyond that point.

While I can understand that he needed to work toward his best interests, I also realized that his success was hugely dependent upon mine. In reality, I wasn’t his product, I was his partner.

I mention this because I’ve often had similar thoughts about working with customers. I've mostly worked in the service sector where I’m not selling a loaf of bread or some other sort of commodity or product. Instead, I generally sell consulting and training solutions to marketers. But in order for this model to work, I can’t simply approach my clients as if they are a meal ticket. I need to fully understand their needs and how I can best customize a solution to meet those specific needs. I need to understand their pain points including costs of services, timelines, resource restrictions, etc. I need to know something about their personalities and what makes them tick. And, if I do everything possible to align their needs with what I can offer, then we can together create a perfect storm of needs fulfilled. The bottom line is that if they succeed, then I succeed.

And I’m not the only one who has realized this.

Across the board, businesses are constantly seeking innovative ways to gain a competitive edge and foster sustainable growth. One transformative strategy is the recognition of customers not merely as recipients of goods or services but as vital partners in the business ecosystem. This paradigm shift is not just a noble approach but a strategic necessity that can unlock unparalleled benefits for companies across various sectors.

The Shift in Perspective

Traditionally, a great number of businesses have operated on a transactional model, where the primary goal was to sell a product or service, often with little regard for the customer's journey or experience beyond the point of sale. 

However, this perspective is rapidly becoming outdated in a world where customer expectations are higher than ever, and loyalty is hard-won. Today, companies that thrive are those that view their customers through a partnership lens, recognizing that each customer interaction is an opportunity to build a relationship, garner insights, and co-create value. And each piece in the relationship can affect a positive or negative outcome in the whole.

At the core of this relationship is the principle of trust. When businesses listen to their customers, respond to their needs, and treat them with respect and transparency, they build a foundation of trust that can lead to enduring loyalty. This loyalty is not just beneficial; it's essential in an era where customers are bombarded with choices and can easily switch to competitors. As I’ve shared in the past, very few people appreciate being treated as a wallet with legs. But because we have so many options today for whom we do business with, those legs can be made for walking away from an untrustworthy partnership. Today, customers are more likely to stick with you, even in tough times, because they feel valued and understood.

Viewing customers as partners also opens the door to invaluable insights. In a traditional model, businesses might rely on market research or data analytics to understand customer behavior. While these tools are important, they can't replace the nuanced understanding that comes from direct interaction with customers who are engaged as partners. 

One of the most powerful things to happen during the advent of digital marketing and online business in general, is that it forced brands to come down from their ivory towers where they often relied only on market data research or data analytics to understand customer needs and preferences. In this new world the customers finally had a voice that brands and business could hear and often the conversations were not always kind or flattering. 

So much of this ties in with AI driven marketing models in which the data we have is being used to share unique content with unique people. Personalization has gone far beyond simply dropping a first name in an email. Today, a better understanding of what prospects and customers want starts with being willing to listen even if that feedback isn’t always favorable. 

These customers are more likely to provide honest feedback, share ideas for new products or services, and help identify pain points that might not be visible from the inside. This level of insight is gold dust for businesses seeking to innovate and improve continuously.

One of the most powerful things about letting customers become part of the brand experience is that it opens up the opportunity for co-creation. This concept involves letting customers take part in helping create things like brand voice. It means asking customers to share their thoughts on products and even ways they could be improved. It could be as simple as involving customers in product development through feedback and testing or as complex as collaborating on new business models that serve shared interests. Co-creation fosters a sense of ownership among customers, making them more invested in the success of the product or service and, by extension, the company itself.

Treating customers as partners provides a powerful way to differentiate your brand. This approach signals to potential and existing customers that your business values more than just transactions; it values relationships and mutual growth. This can be particularly effective in industries where products and services are largely commoditized, and the customer experience becomes the primary battleground. What is your unique selling proposition?

Finally, viewing customers as partners supports sustainable growth. By building relationships based on trust, gaining deep insights into customer needs, and co-creating value, businesses can develop offerings that are more closely aligned with market demands. This alignment not only drives sales but also promotes positive word-of-mouth and customer advocacy, which are essential for organic growth. Moreover, the partnership approach can lead to more efficient use of resources, as it helps companies focus their efforts on what truly matters to their customers.

These changes aren’t going to happen magically or overnight. Adopting this customer-centric approach requires a cultural shift within the organization. It means prioritizing long-term relationships over short-term sales, encouraging open dialogue with customers, and being willing to adapt based on their feedback. It also involves leveraging technology to facilitate better communication and collaboration with customers, whether through social media, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, or co-creation platforms.

Companies must train their teams to view each customer interaction as an opportunity to deepen the partnership. This includes everything from personalized communication to proactive problem-solving. Moreover, leadership must champion this approach, embedding it into the company's values and performance metrics.

As for recruiters, many will continue to approach their prospects as a commodity to be moved and placed. Others, including some I’ve worked with, have been willing to include me in outcomes and to ask me for my opinion and counsel so that they can do a better job helping me find the perfect role. Which one do you think I prefer to work with and which approach do you think will be more successful in the long-run? You’d be right on both counts.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. To learn more, check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available.

A handful of months ago, I was working on my plans for a new marketing start-up that focused on teaching content marketing best practices to businesses who needed to better understand how to get their brands in front of the right people, at the right times and for as little as possible. In what was simply a spark of inspiration at the moment, my brain suggested that I should definitely include training focused on how Artificial Intelligence technologies are being used today to help content marketers gain a market advantage more quickly and cheaply. In that instant a new brand was born.

While Gravity Clamp may have been sparked into being in a flash, the old quotation from inventor Thomas Edison ‘Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration’ immediately popped into my head. No brand will survive being a well-kept secret and just because you build it doesn't mean anyone is going to care.

While Gravity Clamp remains my brand story, your’s might take a different path. Let’s take a look at some best practices (and AI tools) that can help you get a new brand off the page and into reality.

Understanding the Market and Identifying Your Niche

The first step in launching a successful brand is understanding the market you are entering. In short, who are the people who are going to care enough to pay attention to your brand and want to know more? What are the best ways to conduct research that will identify gaps in the market where your brand can fit in. This involves analyzing competitors, understanding customer needs, and identifying what makes your brand unique. Establishing a clear unique selling proposition (USP) is crucial in differentiating your brand from others.

Crafting a Compelling Brand Story

A brand is more than just a logo or a product; it's a story. In reality, a brand is the story that our customers tell other people about what our business does. Your brand story should resonate with your target audience and reflect the values and mission of your company. It should include a deep sense of the value propositions the brand can offer the marketplace and what problems or challenges it’s solving. This narrative will become the foundation of all your marketing efforts, creating a consistent and compelling image that customers can connect with.

Building a Strong Visual Identity

Visual elements like logos, color schemes, and design aesthetics are critical in making your brand recognizable and memorable. Tools like Dall-E and Midjourney can be powerful logo prototyping tools and may even offer up candidates that are the final logo choices. Be certain to invest some time into ways the logos can be used consistently (page placement, orientation, size, etc) so that you can guarantee brand consistency that always aligns with your brand story.

Utilizing Digital Marketing Strategies

There are literally hundreds of ways that digital marketers can get the word out. While not all are created equal, whats going to be of value to your business is going to depend on your unique needs and story. That said, here’s a few options that every modern business needs to understand.

1. Website and Landing Page SEO:

Your website is often the first point of contact between your brand and potential customers but are you using the best keywords to create the right connections?  Strong SEO practices will help your brand appear in relevant search results, increasing visibility, and tools like Quattr can help you to tweak and strengthen your website and landing page content so that it better aligns with your target audience’s needs and expectations. By quickly generating content titles, H1 headers, SEO friendly URLs, and meta descriptions, you can increase the odds that your content will be seen by the right people.

2. Social Media Presence:

Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and engaging with customers. I like to think of it as a place to build new doorways to your website and landing pages. A lot of what drives social media is how well a brand can place content that will resonate with prospective customers or brand supporters.   This means that you again need to know a great deal about the kinds of people who are most likely going to be attracted and interested in your brand so that you can post messages and comments that are going to be reacted to in a positive way. It also means that not all social media channels are created equal. Be sure to choose platforms that align with your target audience and use them to showcase your products, share your brand story, and interact with followers.

3. Content Marketing:

This is a vastly large category to unpack here. Let’s just agree that quality content can attract and engage your target audience. Blogs, videos, infographics, and podcasts can provide value to your audience while establishing your brand as an authority in your niche. But keep testing and analyzing to home in on the best results.

4. Email Marketing:

Perhaps the most powerful direct marketing tool ever created, email marketing allows you to directly reach your customers with personalized messages. The key word here is ‘personalized’. We are all past the point in history where ‘one size fits all marketing’ is necessary or even welcome. The bottom line is that if you’re sending 1000 email messages out the door, there should be 1000 unique messages that focus on the unique needs and situations of the unique people they are reaching. Focus on finding ways to increase personalization capabilities continuously.

5. Engage Your Community

Building a community around your brand can foster loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing. Engage with your audience, respond to feedback, and create opportunities for customers to interact with your brand and each other.

6. Analyze and Adapt

In marketing, the only thing that remains constant is change. Continuously monitor the performance of your marketing strategies using analytics tools like On Page, Outranking and MarketMuse. Always be ready to adapt and refine your approach based on what works best for your brand.

Starting a new brand is a journey filled with challenges and opportunities. To increase those opportunities, focus on crafting a compelling brand story, and leveraging digital marketing strategies. Over time you can quickly establish a strong presence and build a loyal customer base. Remember, the most successful brands are those that continuously evolve with their audiences and the market.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. To learn more, check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available.

As a marketing educator who has been in the email marketing space for much of my career, one of the conversations I have had many times over the years with my clients is the value of having a list of people you can contact who genuinely are interested in the products and services your organization offers.

Because of CAN-SPAM compliance law in the United States, the easy reality for email marketers is that they are legally required to only send emails to those people who have given them express permission to do so. When prospects opt-n to be a willing recipient, it opens a fair exchange space for marketers to share their value propositions with prospects and customers. There's a lot to be said about the value that this approach gives marketers because in reality it allows them to develop genuine relationships between their brands and their prospects.

That said, at the same time many modern marketers are also being pressured to amass a large following on email (and other channels like social media) and this can lead to the temptation of buying or renting followers. While this might seem like a quick fix, the long-term consequences can be detrimental, leading to disconnects with the audience and an ongoing financial drain to maintain this artificially inflated base.

As the great comedian and actor George Burns once pointed out, “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made’. Humor aside, the true key to success in the modern age of marketing IS sincerity and that means taking the necessary time to develop meaningful relationships with the people you want to become your future customers.

While CAN-SPAM compliance law makes it very clear that buying email audiences in verboten, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be easily done. Simply Google ‘email lists to buy or rent’ and you’ll find a very willing list of vendors who would like to sell you some people. However, this approach is the antithesis of how modern marketers are reaching set goals. As we’ve discussed in this blog in the past, marketing success is about reaching the right people and not the most people.

Purchasing followers can create an illusion of popularity and influence. On the surface, high follower counts can appear impressive, but this strategy lacks genuine engagement. Real success on social media and email campaigns is measured not just by the number of followers but by the interaction and engagement these followers have with the content. Artificial followers, typically bots or inactive accounts, don't engage with content, leading to abnormally low engagement rates. This disparity can damage credibility, as savvy users and potential business partners can often tell when followers are bought.

Genuine followers who are interested in your brand or message are more likely to engage with your content, share it, and ultimately convert into customers or loyal fans. When followers are bought, you lose the opportunity to build a community of real people who care about your brand and are willing to advocate for it. Consider them silent partners who are willing to tell their friends about how much they like what your business can do for them.

Another downside of buying access to large groups of people is that it often becomes necessary to keep throwing money into the machine to maintain those numbers. From stories about Facebook advertisers discovering that after spending money to reach people they need to keep spending money to continue to have access to those same people, to very high unsubscribe and bounce rates (not to mention spam complaints) for companies buying and using rented email lists, buying people often creates a financial burden with little to no return on investment. 

I’ll also mention that these practices can damage brands. For example,  if an email marketers were to use a rented list to reach out to possible new prospects, spam complaints by recipients who are well aware that they are not part of an opt-in audience,  can greatly affect the sender reputation of those companies among Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who are responsible for delivering those emails. The results of a damaged reputation can include having more legitimate emails being filtered out as suspected SPAM messages and even having IP addresses being fully blocked so that no emails can be sent through that ISP in the future. 

The bottom line is that in order to be successful marketers need to grow their audiences organically. They need to develop real relationships with prospects over time. They need to understand the needs and desires of the people who have given permission to be contacted to the brand. 

As marketers we can’t buy friends from other people.We need to develop those relations ourselves. At the end of the day, having a small group of people who genuinely care about the products and services we offer is so much more powerful than a large group of rented strangers who do not.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available to learn more.

A number of years ago I sat down with a client who shared with me that he was concerned with the email churn rate his company was experiencing. I asked him to elaborate.

“Well, it's pretty simple”, he told me. “Three months ago we had 130,000 subscribers. Today we only have 110,000. We’ve lost 20,000 subscribers in the past few months!”

I thought about this for a moment before asking him a question that he wasn’t ready to answer.

“Did you really lose them or did they do you the favor of ducking out so you could focus more on the people who care about what you have to say?”

For so many years I worked with clients who were all about reach and frequency. It was about reaching eyeballs. But I often countered that effective marketing wasn’t about reaching the most people, it was about reaching the right people.

Back then I watched companies try to bulk up their email lists by using things like sweepstakes giveaways to increase their numbers. What we discovered was that at the end of the day, instead of having a list of people you can chat with about your products and services, you had a list of people who were hoping they'd be lucky enough to win a new car or giant flat screen TV.

This idea of trying to reach the greatest number of people has hung on longer than it really should have.

If I could offer you access to 1,000,000 followers who didn’t really care much about what you do for a living or 1,000 people who are very interested in what you had to say about your products and services, which would you choose?

For me, having 1,000 people who would want to participate in conversations about ways I can help them would be the holy grail. I would want to cultivate that list and frankly, remove from it anyone that was merely a tire kicker.

A few years ago futurist and all around thought leader Kevin Kelly put forward the idea of 1,000 true fans. The basic question was could a writer or other type of artist or business make a living from having just 1,000 consistent fans willing to make a few small purchases a year? His conclusion was not only could they, but there were plenty of examples of people who were making a good living selling directly to people who truly wanted to engage with them.

A great example of this is writer Jeremy Robinson. Apart from being a prolific novelist covering a range of sci-fi, fantasy and slightly dystopian topics, Jeremy and his team have spent years growing and cultivating a community of fans and readers. This means that every time Jeremy publishes a new book (which is currently 3 to 4 times a year), he already has a captive audience he can turn to to promote the book and get them to share the news with their friends.

And Jeremy certainly isn’t the only creator to discover that by selling directly to fans writers and other artists can have deeper control over outcomes and profitability.

Can businesses outside of the arts use a similar playbook to reach ‘fans’ who really care about their brands? I think they can.

When marketers approach their customers as friends instead of conquests, interesting things happen. Years ago, a great deal of marketing felt like a predator/prey relationship. If a marketer hid behind a bush long enough, an unsuspecting prospect would eventually come along to be pounced upon and sold to. Today, the marketers who are succeeding are those who can keep in mind that the prospects they want to make contact with are real people with real needs and real emotions. In most cases they’re looking for solutions to problems they face in their day to day lives. But they’re rarely just looking for a vendor who offers products that meet those needs. It also matters to them that they like and trust that brand.

People also want to be respected by the people they do business with. Nobody likes feeling like a wallet with legs. Of course we all understand that there will be a value exchange between us as consumers and a vendor, but we still like the idea of being respected while the exchange is taking place.

This means that vendors need to find ways to actively engage prospects almost as if they were trying to make friends.

However, this isn’t always a fast or easy thing to grow. This type of marketing needs to be grown organically over time. It's very hard to win hearts and minds simply because you threw a lot of money at the problem. Instead marketers need to create situations when people can discover them and their brand values and then make a decision to be part of that community. It's about making friendships happen between a brand and the people who want to be part of that brand’s community.

Today, if I was working with the same customer concerned about his email churn rate I might actually take it as good news.

“Great!” I would tell him, “You have successfully gotten rid of 20,000 people who don’t want to be part of your community. This makes it easier for you to reach the people who really do care about what you can do for them”.

The bottom line is that all brands need to be able to tell a compelling story about what they offer the marketplace and need to do so in a way that is engaging and inclusive. It’s all about being authentic and giving the people that you reach the ability to be part of your brand team.  

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available to learn more.

A number of years ago I sat down with a client who shared with me that he was concerned with the email churn rate his company was experiencing. I asked him to elaborate.

“Well, it's pretty simple”, he told me. “Three months ago we had 130,000 subscribers. Today we only have 110,000. We’ve lost 20,000 subscribers in the past few months!”

I thought about this for a moment before asking him a question that he wasn’t ready to answer.

“Did you really lose them or did they do you the favor of ducking out so you could focus more on the people who care about what you have to say?”

For so many years I worked with clients who were all about reach and frequency. It was about reaching eyeballs. But I often countered that effective marketing wasn’t about reaching the most people, it was about reaching the right people.

Back then I watched companies try to bulk up their email lists by using things like sweepstakes giveaways to increase their numbers. What we discovered was that at the end of the day, instead of having a list of people you can chat with about your products and services, you had a list of people who were hoping they'd be lucky enough to win a new car or giant flat screen TV.

This idea of trying to reach the greatest number of people has hung on longer than it really should have.

If I could offer you access to 1,000,000 followers who didn’t really care much about what you do for a living or 1,000 people who are very interested in what you had to say about your products and services, which would you choose?

For me, having 1,000 people who would want to participate in conversations about ways I can help them would be the holy grail. I would want to cultivate that list and frankly, remove from it anyone that was merely a tire kicker.

A few years ago futurist and all around thought leader Kevin Kelly put forward the idea of 1,000 true fans. The basic question was could a writer or other type of artist or business make a living from having just 1,000 consistent fans willing to make a few small purchases a year? His conclusion was not only could they, but there were plenty of examples of people who were making a good living selling directly to people who truly wanted to engage with them.

A great example of this is writer Jeremy Robinson. Apart from being a prolific novelist covering a range of sci-fi, fantasy and slightly dystopian topics, Jeremy and his team have spent years growing and cultivating a community of fans and readers. This means that every time Jeremy publishes a new book (which is currently 3 to 4 times a year), he already has a captive audience he can turn to to promote the book and get them to share the news with their friends.

And Jeremy certainly isn’t the only creator to discover that by selling directly to fans writers and other artists can have deeper control over outcomes and profitability.

Can businesses outside of the arts use a similar playbook to reach ‘fans’ who really care about their brands? I think they can.

When marketers approach their customers as friends instead of conquests, interesting things happen. Years ago, a great deal of marketing felt like a predator/prey relationship. If a marketer hid behind a bush long enough, an unsuspecting prospect would eventually come along to be pounced upon and sold to. Today, the marketers who are succeeding are those who can keep in mind that the prospects they want to make contact with are real people with real needs and real emotions. In most cases they’re looking for solutions to problems they face in their day to day lives. But they’re rarely just looking for a vendor who offers products that meet those needs. It also matters to them that they like and trust that brand.

People also want to be respected by the people they do business with. Nobody likes feeling like a wallet with legs. Of course we all understand that there will be a value exchange between us as consumers and a vendor, but we still like the idea of being respected while the exchange is taking place.

This means that vendors need to find ways to actively engage prospects almost as if they were trying to make friends.

However, this isn’t always a fast or easy thing to grow. This type of marketing needs to be grown organically over time. It's very hard to win hearts and minds simply because you threw a lot of money at the problem. Instead marketers need to create situations when people can discover them and their brand values and then make a decision to be part of that community. It's about making friendships happen between a brand and the people who want to be part of that brand’s community.

Today, if I was working with the same customer concerned about his email churn rate I might actually take it as good news.

“Great!” I would tell him, “You have successfully gotten rid of 20,000 people who don’t want to be part of your community. This makes it easier for you to reach the people who really do care about what you can do for them”.

The bottom line is that all brands need to be able to tell a compelling story about what they offer the marketplace and need to do so in a way that is engaging and inclusive. It’s all about being authentic and giving the people that you reach the ability to be part of your brand team.  

In my last column I shared 100 potential content marketing channels that digital marketers can use to reach their target audiences (100 Magic Doorways). What I didn’t mention in that column was that this was in no way a recommendation that ANY marketer should try to wrangle 100 channels at any given time.

In the 1990’s British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggest that, based on the brain size of human beings and social structures, that human beings, on average, were able to maintain a maximum of 150 stable relationships (known as Dunbar’s Number).

I mention this because I has occured to me in the past that in order to meaningfully maintain any of my friendships requires a certain amount of time and attention. This same holds true for creating relationships with prospects and customers.

I often think about my ongoing list of marketing projects almost like the Vaudeville era plate spinning acts. If I try to get too many plates spinning at one time (or managing friendships or marketing projects) it’s only a matter of time before things start to crash down around me. Part of what works for me is knowing what my limitations are.

For example, if I’m the only person creating content for my organization, then my list of ‘to do’ is going to be very finite. Depending on other responsibilities in my ‘day job’, writing 2 blog posts, 12 social media posts, creating 2 YouTube videos and keeping the brand web site updated is a full time job by itself. If I were to add to that list the need to plan a webinar, write an eBook, and design a training course, then I’m potentially setting myself up for a dramatic failure.

The path to success in content marketing is to approach your marketing like planting a garden. There is no reality where a gardener can simply toss a handful of seeds on the ground and then come back next day to harvest a bounty. Instead, a successful garden is based on making sure that the seeds take root and that the seedlings have the correct ratio of sunlight, water and nutrients to continue to grow. It means needing to weed the garden, prune as necessary, and keep that friggin woodchuck out of the garden!

If each of these steps is completed sufficiently, then the garden will yield results and be worth all the time and effort put into its maintenance.

In 2024, one of the things that will be dramatically changing this formula is the addition of AI Marketing tools to the average content marketing mix. The time-saving aspect of AI in digital marketing is a huge benefit. By automating content creation tasks, campaign management, and performance analysis, AI tools can substantially reduce the time and effort required to develop and implement marketing campaigns. In turn, this will significantly change how many tasks a single content creator will be able to produce in the same amount of time.

This efficiency not only accelerates the marketing process but also reduces costs and minimizes human error, leading to more effective and profitable marketing campaigns. The integration of AI in digital marketing isn’t just a trend, This is a fundamental shift in how marketing strategies are developed and executed.

This is where Gravity Clamp comes in. We offer AI Marketing Solutions to help marketers better understand the tools and strategies available in today’s marketplace.

To learn more about how we might help your company, check us out at gravityclamp.com. Also visit our YouTube channel for an always fresh look at the latest and greatest AI marketing tools.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available to learn more.

Years ago, when I was teaching digital marketing at the graduate level, I asked my class to share with me a single marketing channel that would allow a marketer to reach 100% of their target audience.

After offering up some half-hearted guesses like television or outdoor, one student raised her hand and asked “Is that even possible?”

I told her I didn’t think it was.

So as a follow-up I asked if anyone could identify 100 channels, each which could reach 1% of a target audience, and we were off and running.

It has long been my experience that effective content marketing is based on ‘fishing where the fish are’. While we can cast thousands of lines and even catch some fish, are they the fish we wanted to catch? At the end of the day, effective marketing isn’t about reaching people. It’s about reaching the right people.

By understanding who your target audiences are, what their needs are, how they will look for solutions to the challenges and where they might look for solutions is the key to creating a meaningful connection between a brand and an audience.

For years, many marketers were deeply of the opinion that reaching as many people as possible as often as possible was the key to branding success. The reality is that this approach does indeed reach a great number of people but the vast majority of them are the wrong people.

Instead, by recognizing that the ‘right’ people for any brand are going to be the people who find the marketing content relevant and useful to them and their needs, opens the doors to share that content with them.

100 Magic Doorways

While the content marketing channels you might use to reach your brand’s target audiences will vary, here’s a list of 100 possible content marketing channels and approaches that just might allow you to open up 100 magic doorways (many free to use) to allow you to reach your people where they will best find you.

1. Websites, Microsites and Landing Pages

2. Blogs

3. Vlogs

4. Ebooks

5. Newsletters

6. Email Campaigns

7. Podcasts

8. Webinars

9. Online Courses

10. Mobile Apps

11. Facebook

12. Instagram

13. LinkedIn

14. Snapchat

15. Pinterest

16. TikTok

17. Threads

18. BlueSky

19. YouTube Channels

20. Forums (e.g., Reddit, Quora)

21. Infographics

22. Online Brochures and Lookbooks

23. Online Communities

24. Case Studies

25. Whitepapers

26. Guides

27. Reports

28. Press Releases

29. Interviews

30. Testimonials

31. Product Reviews

32. How-to Guides

33. FAQs

34. Checklists

35. Templates

36. Surveys

37. Polls and Quizzes

38. Photo sharing

39. Slide sharing

40. Animations

41. GIFs

42. Slideshows

43. Audiobooks

44. Music Playlists

45. Stories (Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat)

46. Live Streaming

47. Social Media Ads

48. Polls and Surveys

49. Influencer Collaborations

50. User-Generated Content

51. Hashtag Campaigns

52. Giveaways and Contests

53. Google Ads

54. Bing Ads

55. Customer Surveys

56. Chatbots and AI Assistants

57. Press Release Distribution

58. Influencer Marketing

59. Guest Blogging

60. Event Sponsorships

61. Networking Events

62. Brand Partnerships

63. Community Engagement

64. Display Ads

65. Social Media Ads

66. Retargeting Campaigns

67. Native Advertising

68. Sponsored Content

69. Affiliate Marketing

70. Product Descriptions

71. Sales Emails

72. Promotional Offers

73. E-commerce Platforms (e.g., Shopify)

74. Online Marketplaces (e.g., Amazon, eBay)

75. Customer Reviews and Ratings

76. Print Magazines

77. Newspapers

78. Brochures

79. Flyers

80. Posters

81. Billboards

82. Direct Mail

83. Radio Ads

84. TV Commercials

85. Networking Events

86. Virtual Trade Shows

87. Online Seminars and Workshops

88. Certification Programs

89. Printed books

90. Industry Blogs and Journals

91. Conferences and Summits

92. Industry-Specific Forums

93. Niche Social Media Groups

94. Local Business Directories

95. Niche Marketplaces

96. Specialized News Outlets

97. Quizzes

98. Augmented Reality (AR) Experiences

99. Virtual Reality (VR) Content

100. Interactive Ebooks

101. Gamified Content

While this is a good start, I’m under no illusions that this is an exhaustive list. Can you think of any great digital channels that I’ve missed? Please feel free to reach out to me at spider@gravityclamp.com and perhaps I can explore your ideas in a future column.

About Spider Graham

Spider Graham is the Founder and CEO of Gravity Clamp and has been a fixture in digital content marketing for nearly 30 years. As a technology writer and strategies trainer, Spider spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make content marketing even more powerful and offers AI Marketing focused training and consulting services. Check out Gravity Clamp’s free course on AI Marketing Fundamentals while it's still available to learn more.