While understanding the foundation of AI technologies seems pertinent to improving my skill set as a UX designer on web and software applications, the driver for my hands-on usage of many of the content creation tools out there is because I need digital assets for a marketing campaign.
My side project outside of work is writing a book. It’s urban fantasy and I have not even finished the first draft. But I’m close and everything I’ve learned about book publishing has said to start marketing yourself before the book is done. Luckily, I’ve worked on not one, but two digital marketing teams in previous jobs, and my degree in Web Design & Interactive Media cross-cut a bunch of different technologies (even if those four classes in Flash proved to be worthless not even six months after I graduated. Oh well.) Not only did I get a foundation in coding, but I also learned photo manipulation, content management systems, video editing, and my senior keystone project was building an e-commerce site that sold email marketing template downloads (and I made those too.)
A marketing class from Elizabethtown College prepared me for writing an actual marketing plan as part of contract work for On the Go Education. DLT Solutions reinforced video editing as I helped to reformat webinars into downloads to promote lead capture on the website. At Connections Education, I went one step further and began manually captioning all of the video assets as I began a deep dive into web accessibility content guidelines. I was exposed to content strategies for generating leads from social media, SEO, email, and marketing websites. While I’m a little further down the funnel these days and working on a software product team, I still work closely with product managers to make sure design requirements factor in business objectives and product vision.
But circling back around to AI and the reason I decided to learn MidJourney in the first place, my target demographic of people who I believe are likely to read my book are millennials and the older end of the Gen Z spectrum. Both of those groups combined make up 40% of TikTok’s audience base. But TikTok means videos. I definitely have some video editing experience, but videos, even short form videos, are a time-consuming media to make.
I have content strategy. I have scripts and I finally tracked down where Apple hides their Video Memo audio recordings (but boy they don’t make it easy and it’s a bad sign when you have to use command line in Terminal to open files.) I could record myself speaking, which is significantly faster, but that isn’t quite as creative for me and this whole adventure is really to scratch the creative itch. Since I’m taking the scenic route, I need to be practical, and I’m using this as my motivation to learn AI tools.