Amazon’s AI shopping assistant is as dumb as rocks [MDSR #12]

Will AI level the Google search playing field or amplify the idiocy of SEO word soup? 

This is the question on 30% of readers’ minds as major changes to the digital landscape loom on the not-so-distant horizon of 2024. 

Let’s get into it.

Hot Off The Presses 📰

Whether or not AI-generated content is a solid SEO hack — which it probably isn’t in light of Google’s recent search update — one thing is clear: Most of us are already late to the party as far as the rest of the generative AI marketing applications are concerned. And it’s worth catching up, because AI is still the future of search. If not online shopping in general. 

The writing’s on the wall with Google’s SGE already powering 84% of queries. But exactly how the new SGE ad format will impact PPC performance and placements remains unclear — even to the experts studying it. So far, they say, “The main takeaway here is that we need to stay on top of things. Changes seem to be happening practically every day.” 

Not exactly reassuring for the digital marketing budget. But at least optimizing content for SGE should be pretty straightforward. Conversation will be king, with dynamic dialogue taking precedence over speedy information. 

Amazon may have missed that memo, though. Popular opinion is that many chatbots (including Amazon’s shopping assistant Rufus) are still dumb as rocks. 

That probably won’t slow down the average Amazon average customer** — white Gen X women who spend $2662 on Amazon purchases annually — from snapping up the hottest products of March 2024. Especially now that shopper-facing enhancements like virtual try-ons and “view in your room” features are live in the app. 

**At least until April 7th when Target launches its own version of Amazon Prime starting at $49/year…

Million Dollar Advice 💸 

Industry benchmarks and broad category data may seem like enough context to evaluate a business opportunity. 

But if you’ve been relying on them exclusively to size up the impact of your next move, you’re not digging deep enough to get the full story. 

And you may want to hear Naseem Saloojee’s thoughts on the importance of talking to the industry, verifying those benchmarks — and knowing exactly where you as an individual can add the most value. 

Listen to Naseem Saloojee: How to Evaluate Business Opportunity and Market Potential

Build Your Customer Journey with ChatGPT 🗺️

We love a good Whiteboard Friday from Moz, so we’re excited to share one of their latest and greatest about building a thoughtful customer journey for your website with ChatGPT.

If you’re newer to the game and are currently lacking traditional customer insights from surveys, focus groups, or interviews to go off of — this one’s for you.

Here’s a quick and dirty summary of how to get into your audience’s head with some help from our favorite chatbot:

• The goal of this exercise is to generate a list of your audience’s motivations and pain points, and map them to customer journey stages and milestones respectively

• Step one is giving ChatGPT a prompt to return a list of customer motivations based on your business category and key products and services (e.g., if you sell fitness trackers, you’d ask ChatGPT, “What are the key motivations when customers search for fitness trackers?”)

• ChatGPT will generate a list of motivations — those are the stages of your customer journey

• Zero in on a specific stage / motivation and ask ChatGPt for the corresponding pain points 

• ChatGPT will generate another list of pain points — hose are the milestones of your customer journey

• Rinse and repeat each stage / motivation and pain point / milestone

• Once you have all of that info laid out, you can determine exactly how to map it to your website so visitors can find what they’re looking for 

And there you have it. That’s how you can actually make your site perform better with ChatGPT.

Think these are helpful?

Insta Data Rush 🌊

If you’re constantly wondering if you were shadowbanned on Instagram, you’re not alone. 

With engagement all over the place on social media, online sellers need resources like Sprout Social’s Instagram Stats Roundup to keep tabs on the bigger picture.

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes:

🔎 70% of shoppers look to Instagram to find their next purchase

💄 More than half of Instagram users are there to follow brands and research products

⏳ Adults in the US spend 33 minutes per day on the platform 

💁 People aged 18-34 use Instagram the most 

📢 Instagram’s ad reach has been increasing 12% YoY

📱In-feed ads have a better CTR than story ads

💳 Brands see an average conversion rate of 1% on Instagram 

🎞️ Reels still have the highest reach rate at 30.81%, which is double the rate of other content formats.

Read all the stats here.

Highlights From MDS Inspire ✨

There’s nothing quite like brushing elbows with hundreds of elite sellers. At MDS Inspire 2024 we did it all: we networked, shared insights, reconnected with old friends, got genuinely inspired — and had fun.

And remember — it’s never too early to secure your early bird ticket for MDS Inspire 2025.

Featured Partnership 🤝

A shout-out to fellow MDS member, Erick Rodriguez, and his company AmzAllStars, who is behind the off-shore teams of Thrasio, Unybrands, and others.

They have a limited-time offer for MDS, for Pre-Trained / Pre-Vetted Filipino Amazon Account Managers with Extensive Data-Dive experience 

On average they have:

• College degrees 12+ years of career experience

• 2+ years of Amazon working experience

• Have under-gone weeks of enhanced Amazon Account Management training

• AmzAllStar Certified Data-Dive Listing Optimization Experts

For more info visit ➡️ https://amzallstars.ph/datadive

Or schedule a call ➡️ HERE

Did you see that post 📲

Any strong engagement on AI-generated content was probably from AI-generated traffic, anyway. 

Until Next Time ✌️

As always, thanks for sticking with us until the end. 

If you’d care to share your thoughts on this newsletter, we’re all ears. Just hit reply to sound off. 

See you next time with more of the latest and greatest content you need to succeed this year 🔥

Sincerely, 

Looking for a mastermind community?

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If you are looking for a business professional community made for ecom entrepreneurs, then consider applying today. 

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