These two digital marketing things got me hyped this week.
Grok 2.0
𝕏’s Grok 2.0 will generate images of anybody doing anything.
You’ve probably seen the controversial images at this point.
A few things to note:
- This functionality rolled out to everybody on Thursday, 8/15/24.
- It’s already being patched. Some of the controversial prompts that worked Thursday no longer work.
- If it is restricted to the extent OpenAI’s image generation tool, DALL·E, is then even more ‘innocent’ images like the heading image here will not be possible.
- Midjourney isn’t a great alternative as it has trouble with recognizable characters combined with familiar logos and text.
Which leaves us with how marketers have been using Grok 2.0 for the past few days:
- Generating many images of familiar characters doing things in their niche. Examples:
- SEO.
- Shopping for shoes on Amazon.
- Drinking iced tea in a backyard.
- Plumbing.
- Fitness.
- Marketers are making libraries of these images to use for future campaigns.
- The idea is this functionality won’t last much longer. Marketers are creating these images while they still can.
- They’re not having the characters use their products. They’re having the characters involved in their niche.
I made a video about this:
Somebody commented, “Marketers are still responsible for what they post. And if they get sued they’ll hardly win a lawsuit by saying, ‘But Grok let me generate it.’” I responded, “Marketers aren’t putting their products in the images, nor are they saying they generated them. Regarding using famous characters – meme marketing is a real thing and many memes use famous people.”
How to easily create these marketing images with Grok 2.0:
- Have ChatGPT write the prompt for Grok 2.0. Tell ChatGPT, for example, “Write a Midjourney prompt for ‘Draw Thor played by Chris Hemsworth doing search engine optimization – he is sitting behind a computer, looking at the Google interface. The image is from the side making both Thor’s face and the computer screen visible. The scene is set in Asgard.’”
- ChatGPT will write you a prompt. Put that prompt into Grok 2.0.
- To go even harder, take the image from Grok 2.0, put it into Kling AI (which is free), and have ChatGPT write you a video prompt. “Write a Kling AI video description for Thor doing search engine optimization.” Here’s what you get:
Marketers are using these images and videos in Instagram/TikTok Carousel posts, stories, and Reels/TikToks/YouTube Shorts. The recognizable characters are easy sources of engagement and prime the viewers to think of the marketer’s niche before the brand/product is shown.
Podcast Guesting
I’m PodMatch’s biggest affiliate and previously was one of their biggest power users. As I’ve shared before, I used it to go on 30 podcasts in 3 months.
Then I stopped because my daily TikToks/IG Reels were getting so much more reach than podcasts.
But something I took for granted which I noticed only this week:
- Google Images prefers pulling images from many different sources rather than one source. Images for me and my brands are populated by YouTube thumbnails from the podcasts I went on (even if the podcasts are very small) and from these podcasts’ websites.
- I actually got many more SEO backlinks than I realized. And these backlinks are going to pages that are now ranking.
- You can somewhat control the anchor text you get for these links. By putting the keywords you care about next to the URLs you want podcasts to link to, they’ll sometimes just use that anchor text.
It’s no secret I’ve been working on a bottom-of-funnel SEO program, called Compact Keywords, since the beginning of April.
As the product is nearing completion, I’m making a long launch plan.
Something that I’m going to do again is podcast guesting. Why:
- The benefits I previously mentioned. I’ll be doing SEO for my SEO product. The links will help.
- The podcast appearances will rank for the product brand name. This gives social proof.
- I’ll get further social proof when I share to my Instagram and TikTok stories me going on 2-3 podcasts a week.
- More podcasts than before (I was going hard with PodMatch Q4 2022) do have legit/unique audiences for me to promote to.
I don’t often share my marketing plans. But this is one I’m very excited about so I thought maybe my energy would come through here and get you excited too. To try this yourself, here’s my guide for how I got on so many podcasts.
If there’s something you’re working on / doing marketing for, this podcast plan, and Grok images, are fun.
