What is AI marketing?
AI marketing uses artificial intelligence to complete, plan or execute marketing activities and objectives. Additionally, AI in marketing can leverage capabilities such as data collection, data-driven analysis, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to gather insights on customers and audiences.
Marketing artificial intelligence strategies often differ from company to company, depending on your needs, goals, industry, employee skills and other factors.
AI marketing is still a relatively new concept, so it’s understandable if you’re unsure where to start. This guide outlines the advantages and disadvantages of AI marketing and provides three strategies you can implement today to integrate AI into your business operations.
The advantages of AI marketing
There are clear benefits to implementing AI marketing in your business operations, including:
- Efficiency: artificial Intelligence can automate many tasks, enabling teams to shift focus from smaller tasks to areas with greater impact on the business.
- Cost savings: increased efficiency allows employees to complete more work in fewer hours, reducing labour costs for business owners.
- Innovation: artificial Intelligence draws on extensive data sets that can be leveraged to generate new ideas. Using AI in marketing may help spark innovations you might not have otherwise considered.
- Staying competitive: as more companies adopt AI, it’s important to act quickly and take advantage of these tools to remain on par with competitors.
The disadvantages of AI marketing
Some of the potential downsides of using artificial intelligence in your marketing practices include:
- Privacy and ownership concerns: AI tools typically learn by scouring and analysing publicly available information online. This raises questions about privacy and intellectual property. When using an AI tool, it is essential to understand whether, you own the final product and the data and inputs you provide may be stored and reused by the AI tool.
- Limited creativity: as AI usage becomes widespread, suggested marketing ideas may be less original, as competitors might use the same tools and receive similar results. AI cannot match the originality and creativity of human ideas.
- Biases and inaccuracies: artificial intelligence is not infallible. It cannot always identify inaccurate or biased information, which means its outputs may contain these issues.
Three strategies for AI marketing
If you’re ready to implement AI marketing in your business operations, here are three strategies you can start using today.
1. Use AI tools to write your copy
Every business needs marketing copy, which may include:
- Emails
- Website landing pages
- Brochures and information guides
- Social media posts
- Blogs
- Video scripts
- Advertisements (digital, radio, podcast, etc.)
Many businesses have a marketer or copywriter on staff (or on contract) who produces all the marketing copy, but this can be expensive and time-consuming. Their efficiency can be greatly improved by using AI in their copywriting tasks.
However, there’s a nuance to it. AI should not replace the writer entirely. The most effective approach is to equip your copywriter with AI as a tool to work alongside them.
A marketer or writer can use artificial intelligence to generate topic ideas, outlines or first drafts. From there, it’s essential for a human to review, edit and refine the content to ensure it reflects your brand voice and messaging.
Encourage your marketing team to use AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to accelerate content production while maintaining quality and consistency.
2. Use AI tools for video editing
If you’ve planned a marketing strategy in recent years you’ll probably have come across the phrase ‘video is king’. Video is a powerful way to engage with customers and prospects.
As video is entertaining, people are more likely to consume it. Including a video on a web page can also encourage users to stay longer, which may improve your company’s SEO ranking. Emails and advertisements also tend to achieve higher conversion rates when they include video.
However, video delivers strong marketing results only if it is well-produced and edited. This is where AI marketing can add value.
AI video tools can assist with creating and editing content, reducing the time your team spends on production while increasing efficiency.
Incorporating these tools into your broader marketing strategy can help diversify campaigns, boost engagement, and improve conversion rates.
3. Use AI tools to gain customer and audience insights
Effective marketing is strategic and driven by data. You can’t rely on instinct alone and hope that your marketing tactics will succeed. To achieve meaningful impact, your decisions must be supported by reliable insights.
Thanks to AI, businesses now have access to detailed information about their customers and prospects, enabling them to adjust their marketing efforts with precision.
Here are some examples of how AI tools provide insights into your audience:
- Advertisement analysis: digital advertising can be expensive. AI-powered tools, such as Levity, can predict an ad’s performance before it is launched. This enables businesses to refine campaigns without wasting marketing budget.
- Social listening: a significant aspect of marketing is maintaining a strong brand image. Social listening tools have existed for some time, tracking and alerting you whenever your company is mentioned or tagged online. With AI integration, these tools can now analyse the tone and intent of online mentions, and provide recommendations on how to respond, when to post, and which collaborators to engage with.
- Customer churn analysis: many business owners know that acquiring a new customer is more expensive than retaining an existing one, making churn management essential. AI can now automate churn predictions. These tools analyse customer data, such as NPS scores, feedback, comments, and engagement, to assign a risk level for churn. Businesses can then focus retention efforts on high-risk accounts to maintain revenue.
Using marketing artificial intelligence wisely
AI marketing tools cannot replace your marketing team. These platforms work best when the final output is reviewed and refined by a human.
However, AI tools can enhance the productivity and effectiveness of your marketing employees. It is important to reassure your team that AI is a supportive tool, not a replacement. Avoid forcing them to use AI tools they are uninterested in; instead, identify which platforms they are keen to learn. This approach ensures that adopting AI benefits both the business and its employees.
When used correctly, artificial intelligence can help a business reduce costs, increase output, and foster creativity. Keep in mind that your competitors are likely already exploring or using AI marketing platforms, so the time to start is now.
