AI In Marketing: A Tool, Not A Threat

Breathe easy marketing teams: ChatGPT and similar Artificial Intelligence tools will not be putting you in the unemployment line anytime soon despite growing frets.

It will streamline mundane tasks and produce ideas, but it will not replicate the ingenuity and nuance of the creative mind. Marketers’ objective is to collaborate with AI to liberate staff from routine work and allow a renewed focus and energy on crafting captivating marketing campaigns.

That’s why marketing companies shouldn’t be overly concerned about the hype surrounding AI potentially stealing jobs. It’s a knee-jerk reaction when new technologies appear. In the late 1990s, when Google introduced its search engine, people expressed the same fears. It didn’t happen. Why? Because you had to know what to ask of it.

The same holds true for AI. With a marketing strategy, artificial intelligence can explain what it is, but it can’t provide the nuance and context required, whether it’s B2B, running a SaaS marketing team or creating a campaign for a car company.

Still, AI can be a big help in marketing. Here are some cool ways ChatGPT and MidJourney can be implemented in the marketing scheme to enhance growth potential:

• Roadmap Creation: When building roadmaps for customer success elements, be it conversion rate optimization testing or analytic and marketing technology, an initial presentation can be fed to GPT-4 to edit and refine for clarity and comprehension. Being able to edit this initial presentation has saved us 30-40% time.

• Data Reporting: Not to be confused with data insights, using Code Interpreter to analyze a large amount of data to find trends and patterns helps to find applied insights more quickly. While a lot of the quality of the report depends on the quality of the prompt, the ability to gain quick, actionable insight can streamline the reporting process.

• Creative Ideation: So much time in creative production is spent doing rounds of feedback to get anywhere close to the initial idea. Using tools like Midjourney, FlowGPT, and GPT-4 to create mockups helps designers save time, getting the project 60% of the way there before they go into finish up the project.

Other productive ways to employ the new technology:.

Personalized product recommendations: Analyze a customer’s browsing and purchase history to recommend products that are most relevant to their interests and needs.

Chatbots: Give instant customer support and answer frequently asked questions, freeing up human resources for more complex inquiries.

Predictive analytics: AI algorithms can analyze customer data to predict LTV (lifetime value), which enables performance marketers to optimize spending more effectively.

Ad targeting: Make it easier for platforms to serve ads, which means marketers can spend less time setting up campaigns and more time executing.

Work that is repetitive, time-consuming and manual is the first thing that can be automated. You’ll have happier employees because they will be able to spend more time on creative work.

To marry the work of AI and humans into the current workforce, company leaders need to break down the steps each team member does in a  given week or workflow. Whether it’s designing new ads, conducting data analysis, holding meetings or compiling a marketing budget, each task should be tagged either as repetitive or complex/creative. Anything that falls into the former category has the potential to be automated.

For this to be effective, companies must offer AI training on everything from advanced prompts to ethics. And that starts with new hires.

The ultimate goal  for both human and AI is to connect with the consumer. So, a company must determine: What is an employee’s ability to research? What is their ability to provide context to a designer and augment their work with AI when necessary?

More importantly, perhaps, is people’s ability to adapt and employ critical thinking. Those who will succeed and thrive in this new landscape will be able to figure out how to leverage AI to augment their work, change how they prioritize their time, question what resources they can use and understand what they can learn on their own.

There is an urgency for marketing companies to implement AI tools now while the landscape is still fertile. In five years, AI-generated content will be ubiquitous. The real issue is to figure out how to use it effectively with the right workers.