Helpful if you don't have any tool, but not sure about the value (yet)
Prior to Mavic, I relied on other AI tools to help with content creation (like Voila, Merlin, Straico, etc). When I saw Mavic, I had zero interest in picking it up, until I saw a couple of videos from Jenny Jones (Digital Hacks Club). He shared a video using Octolens and Mavic - and he really loves Mavic, so giving into a little FOMO, I bought Mavic.
If I'm being fully transparent, I don't get. It's marketed as an AI powered brand marketer (reminds me a lot of ReelSight). You can connect your brand to the platform, and then chat with AI to create whatever content you want specifically tailored to your brand. For me, when I log into the dashboard, it's too overwhelming and distracting. Immediately, there's a chat bar, and then some specific tool tabs underneath (generate content ideas, write documents, create social posts, etc). Except that when you click on one of those more detailed tools, it takes you to a chat with the Mavic AI. Moving down the sidebar, there is a content calendar, which isn't anything unique - You can create and plan out content. The additional feature is the ability to save ideas maybe? Going further down the sidebar, more tools include idea playground, document writer, content hub, branding, etc. - again, tools that lead you back to chat. If you've ever used Nichesss, it feels like that - a whole bunch of options, which you may think is helpful, but really overwhelming. It could be a style thing, but I prefer tools where there's a clear flow - start here, then go here, then go here. This looks and feels like the NYC Subway from Times Square - sure, you can get to where you wanna go, but your going to have to work and bump your way through a whole bunch of people and noise to get there.
There is one feature about Mavic I'm liking, namely the customer profile feature. Enter in some info about your ideal customer - say flower shop owner - and it will create a profile for that ICP. You can then create content for that person.
Ultimately, it feels like many of the other AI tools that fly into and out of AS: some prompts on the back-end built into a dashboard (nothing that you can't build as a customGPT in chatgpt). The main kind of content that this is best suited to create is social media content (which, if you have a tool like Marky, and I do, this doesn't do much better, especially considering the AI credit limits). I'm still within the refund window, and will keep trying to use this tool to see if I'm missing something, or can unlock a workflow that feels more efficient, and possibly update this review if something changes. It really bothers me to leave a not-glowing review for a tool. If the founding team reads this, what would be great is possibly a webinar or training series about how to get the most out of the tool (the YT channel is super sparse, just has a view promotional videos)
jesstang
Nov 12, 2024Hi Richard, thank you so much for your thorough review. I've taken a good look at all the comments you've shared, and I wanted to make sure I provide a comprehensive response.
I think the biggest takeaway I'm hearing is that there is a UX issue / lack of workflows. Having multiple options that provides flexibility is not the way to unlock the value you're looking for on a regular basis.
In a nutshell, we want to assist marketers in the following 3 things:
1. Branding strategy - this can be achieved via the brand report, and also updating the brand book within the system. At the moment, a lot of this is user-initiated, but we will work on better flows to improve the cohesiveness of the brand book. That said, I'm glad you like the customer profile generator, we want to provide strategies that are data-driven, not AI-suggested.
2. Social media content calendar - the starting point for this is on the AI-powered planner, and there are a few different ways you can plan out the upcoming content, listed out on this tutorial here: https://mavic.crisp.help/en/category/manage-your-social-media-with-mavic-1l8yydd/. The goal is that you can easily input the activities / ideas you have onto the planner, and click on each of these notes to get relevant ideas. That said, I think what you said about not being intuitive enough is something we want to fix, so that the feature becomes a lot easier to handle.
3. Analytics - we're adding more analytics to mavic as we speak, and we want to offer you an interface to interact with your marketing analytics without having to go through overwhelming data.
I really appreciate that you've highlighted issues beyond additional features / integrations. Even as we continue to add more features, the one key take away I'm seeing is how to reduce the noise, and add more workflows that guide you towards what you need. To share some updates - our next release is going to focus on more of the features that we've heard from the community (eg. team access / AI image generation), but the product sprint after that will be dedicated towards user experience and workflows. If you have more questions, please feel free to connect with us directly!