Expert + AI = NINJA

Today we’re proud to announce Thinkplus is becoming an AI-integrated digital agency, helping our clients grow faster using generative AI.

AI is a transformational technology and has become the stated top priority for the biggest names in tech, who have made it their goal to revolutionise the world of digital marketing with it.

We feel that both the pace of improvement and the quality trajectory is so steep that this technology will heavily impact not just how marketers use their existing tools but how consumers find the products and services they want to buy.

With Google’s Project Magi, Bing Chat, and of course, the search queries that don’t even find their way to a search engine because they’re being typed into ChatGPT, we are already seeing battle lines drawn in the fight for consumer search volume and attention.

And with evidence emerging of AI tools already disrupting buying habits and hiring, it’s clear that we have reached a point where forward-thinking marketing teams and company leadership cannot ignore AI.

We believe that as marketing changes, every brand that relies on search or content for discovery will HAVE to have an AI marketing game plan if they’re to defend their existing market share. And just like the shift to digital led to winners and losers in the 2000s and 2010s, those with the most aggressive AI game plan will use this “changing of the guard” to steal market share from rivals.

We’ve made it part of our mission to help our clients defend and steal market share during this next technological shift.

How Are We Integrating AI into Thinkplus’s Services?

We have integrated generative AI into our digital marketing services on an opt-in basis and are offering this to clients that are a good fit for it.

Our team has been testing the performance and suitability of AI tools for each core marketing task across the channels we work (SEO, Content Marketing, PPC & Paid Media, Website Development, CRO and Email Marketing).

In particular, we’ve been looking for opportunities to use AI that makes our work better or faster (which leads to cost savings). Crucially, when we find a way to meet one or both of these, we pass 100% of the benefit onto any clients we use it for.

This means that our clients receive 100% of the cost savings, speed improvements and quality output resulting from generative AI. Working with Thinkplus gives them the full benefit of the latest generative AI technology AND the benefit of an experienced, ROI-driven team of experts.

ChatGPT vs agency using ChatGPT.

I.e. Isn’t this the end for agencies altogether?

While tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney do a great job of writing convincing-sounding text and creating images, there are clear limitations. Most brands are too sensible to post pure GPT-4 output without any human intervention on a website they care about. For example, “out of the box” rarely matches style guidelines or “feels” as engaging to read as content produced by an experienced copywriter. Even AI content should “feel” like the business it represents, which currently takes some fairly significant human intervention.

For other tasks (e.g. strategic and technical SEO tasks), the AI will “have a go” and produce something convincing-looking to an outsider but not viable to an expert. But this is early days, and we expect the tools to continue developing.

And, of course, there is the well-documented habit of AI tools hallucinating (making stuff up that sounds convincing but isn’t true). This is where our dedicated editorial team (and we’re lucky to be one of the few agencies with a dedicated editorial team) is so useful for fact-checking all AI-generated content. Factual accuracy is important for all businesses, but the implications of factual inaccuracy in published content can be severe in some industries.

In our extensive testing, we’ve found these tools to be dramatically more powerful when collaborating with a skilled human marketer who can direct, give feedback and refine the output.

In the case of generative text, this output then needs to go through fact-checking and editorial to ensure that it is totally accurate and matches the brand’s style guidelines. Importantly, we apply exactly the same quality and accuracy standards to content produced with AI as to content produced fully by a human. In marketing, quality matters.

Despite this, content writing is certainly one of the jobs where AI can dramatically reduce the cost of production, even when considering the extra time required for task editing and fact-checking.

For example, in our tests so far, we’re already producing 30% more content for the same time allocated. And we are aiming to increase this to 60% or more within the next six months. In some cases, the benefit is even greater.

What If Expert + AI Isn’t Right for You?

Generative AI content isn’t right for every business, and we appreciate that some clients will have reasons that AI is a “no” or a “not yet”. We totally understand this and are offering these AI services on an “opt-in” basis, so clients have the choice to continue working with our team in the traditional way.

Some businesses are so specialist that generative AI content doesn’t offer significant time savings compared to one of our expert human writers doing it from scratch.

How will AI change marketing in the longer term?

User behaviour is already shifting, albeit at different speeds for different demographics.

It’s easy to forget that most AI tools capturing people’s attention are still in Beta or even Alpha mode. Basic interfaces, prompting through Discord chats, having to install code locally on your machine. This is extraordinarily disruptive technology considering it is still so new to the market.

But with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Snapchat, Quora, Meta/Facebook, Reddit, Twitter etc. all racing to release and improve their AI products, the companies that built the digital landscape we marketers play in are investing in the future of their businesses in reshaping it.

At EN, our approach to dealing with the unknowns and rapid advancement in AI is to make it an organisational priority to keep our teams up-to-date with the latest advancements. We require our management team to test the tools, working out how to implement them into our work. We have dedicated discussion groups inside the company, where teams are encouraged to share what they see, learn and test. And we publish our AI research on the Thinkplus YouTube channel.

We are also starting a sister AI Consultancy firm, Powered By AI, which will give us close proximity to specialist AI expertise that we can both deploy internally and share with clients.

Nobody knows what the AI future looks like. But one thing is for sure: it looks different to the past. Our mission is to help our clients grow their revenue, and we believe that this next phase of tech will bring both new threats and opportunities to them. We, Ninjas, are here to help them avoid disruption and find marketing opportunities.

If you’d like to request a free digital marketing review, including an assessment of your potential to use generative AI, go to https://exposureninja.com/review and fill in the short form. Eligible businesses will receive a 15-20 minute video review, typically within 2-3 working days, with a customised plan outlining key opportunities and competitor threats.