Campaigning on a Budget

How I set up a simple Facebook marketing campaign with the help of Artificial Intelligence software for free.

This is by no means what we normally do here at MJP. Nor should anyone take this as a tutorial on how to create your own campaigns but, I guess you could if you wanted. This is an internal test of how we could create a marketing campaign on a shoestring budget.

Creating the Campaign

The first creative step is deciding how to market ourselves to a new and unsuspecting audience. We wanted something that would draw attention but with little risk. We would amplify our risk to the point we saw results with click through rates to our website - we have analytic tools setup with Facebook and Google on our website to monitor traffic.

The idea we decided upon was to create a series of posters and animated shorts that would show conflict within business and offer ourselves as salvation to their problem. We named this campaign 'Tension and Resolution'.

Now that we have our strategy the next step was to engage marketing ideas and the fastest method was to prompt ChatGPT to come up with many. Here is an example of one of the prompts that was used in our campaign:

Image: A graphic designer fishing for lightbulbs in a sea of ideas, with a goofy fish wearing a top hat swimming by.
Catchphrase: "Fishing for Ideas? Reel in the Brilliance!"

Here are some tips on how to effectively use prompts with ChatGPT:

• Be prepared to write many prompts before committing ChatGPT for results. LLMs like ChatGPT work best when you have a conversation. The longer the conversation the better prepared ChatGPT can be to give you better results. Actually this is true up to a point as research shows LLMs tend to regress at lengthy chats but we won't worry about any of that.
• Create a role as a prompt eg. 'You are an amazing creative script writer for a super funky graphic design company that prides themselves on their ability to think creatively and have fun.'
• Before entering the prompt always confirm that the prompt is understood with 'Do you understand?'
• Once you have trained your AI then begin to give it a prompt and I always start with 'Using what was said previously now write...'  for the first example only. This may not be entirely necessary but it won't hurt to add it.
• The prompt I started with is not the prompt I am satisfied with. I am yet to discover the best prompt but it best practice to start off slow and redefine your prompt as you go. As with all language there is nuance and AI will not always get it right or understand your intentions or indeed you may not have defined your intent with enough words and that is ok. Be prepared to change words in your prompt or add further clarification later but be bold and throw one out there to get started.
• Create 10 examples - this indicates to ChatGPT the boundaries of the results needed.
• This is the prompt I started with 'Create 10 examples of both image description and a catch phrase. The image is of a graphic designer with a problem and the catch-phrase is the solution. Do you understand?'
• Check the results and improve upon that prompt. 'I like that format but now make it humorous. Give me another 10 examples'

That's it!

I ended up creating about 70 different scenarios. I went as far as changing the character 'Graphic Designer' to an elephant and then added reference to a bird. From here it is time to start generating AI images from the best scenarios, plus any other scenarios I edited or invented. I use Midjourney as my AI of choice but there are a number of free text-to-image generators on the market.

This process involves generating multiple images to make one image I would composite later including text and other graphical elements. I find it best to upscale images to print quality in case I would later print out these designs for a print campaign.

Above are three images I used to composite the final poster below.

For Facebook marketing there are a number of different ways to make comments impactful and there is plenty of information out there for best practices. Sometimes your images will be truncated so I place emphasis with elements in hierarchy with the strongest message to be centred. I have a catch-phrase that precedes the image such as "Fishing for Ideas?" followed by a short description of what we do and ending with a call-to-action such as my phone number and website address. I then use online tools that can format your words into various font formats such as bold or italics. I will add unicode symbols to add emojii style fonts to my comments sometimes replacing words.

Did you know if you delete a website link text the generated preview will persist?

There are a number of ways to add extra impact to your worded comment and it is best to trial these on your Facebook Page first before committing it to your Group or any other page. You can always edit the message or delete it so best to get it right first. Remember that your goal is to keep the messaging on point and concise.

Did you know you can add a website link to your comment and Facebook will generate a preview of that page? Maybe you did but did you know that if you then delete that website link text the generated preview will persist? Great for shortening the comment section. Here is the leading comment I wrote for this Facebook post:

Fishing for Ideas?⁣
⁣ Low cost⁣ Effective⁣ Quick
02902343258 | Graphic Designer now servicing Tauranga http://mixedjungle.co.nz/

Look out for my up-coming blog about how you can add great looking website links to your Facebook post.