2023 has seen an almost exponential rise in the popularity of artificial intelligence (A.I) tools. Digital marketing is one field that can, and is, benefitting massively from its use – but what risk do you run when a robot is managing your online presence? Here, we cover the basics of A.I in the broad sense of digital marketing, including pro’s and con’s, to allow you to make smart decisions about its use in your business.

What is A.I exactly?

A.I is a vast field, and nothing new – it powers most of our online life – but here we are talking about it as intelligent systems that are capable of performing tasks that typically require human brain power, such as learning from data, making decisions, and problem-solving. For example, chatGPT is one free A.I tool that exploded in popularity this year. It is a free online platform that allows users to “talk” with AI, getting in-depth, informed responses to any prompt. Some other popular tools with their uses can be found here.

How can I use it for my business’s marketing strategy?

A.I has been proven to have the capability to help people design and implement digital marketing strategies, including any modality you can think of: social media, web and email marketing to name a few. Some ways that you might want to employ A.I tools might be:

1. Idea generation

You can prompt A.I tools, like chatGPT, to help you come up with ideas for your brands social media or email marketing campaigns. It can be as simple as asking the platform “give me some ideas about what to post on Facebook for my small business”, or can get as tailored as you like, right up to asking the tool to develop a whole marketing strategy for you. 

2. Content creation

A.I tools exist to help you perfect almost any form of content creation – including tools that can generate videos and audios for you. Platforms exist to create realistic text-to-speech audio recordings, images, or videos that you can tailor based on text prompts. 

3. Copywriting

Tools like ChatGPT really hold their own when it comes to copy writing – let me show you: This A.I-powered tool can craft persuasive and captivating copy for various marketing materials, from website content and social media posts to email campaigns and product descriptions. By leveraging its natural language generation abilities, ChatGPT can save time, enhance consistency, and ensure your marketing copy is not only engaging but also tailored to your brand and audience.

A glowing review – except I didn’t write it. I prompted the A.I tool to.

4. Analysing and strategising 

If you have tons of analytic material – email marketing statistics, Google search results – and aren’t sure what to make of them, you can quite simply plug them into text-based A.I tools and ask them to interpret, in simple terms, what they see there. You can use these findings to make informed decisions about what is working for your business (or, you can ask the A.I to do that too!)

Pro’s

A.I tools have three major pro’s working in their favour when it comes to helping people with their marketing efforts. The first benefit is financial. Many tools, including the ones discussed here, are free to use. This might help those of you on a tighter budget to deliver successful marketing campaigns without having to employ teams of people to help you. 

Secondly, A.I tools can act as real time-savers, especially in terms of content-generation. The option is there to simply copy and paste things such as email campaign content, freeing up time for you to focus on other important aspects of your business.

Finally, A.I tools are surprisingly expert – they are built upon a wealth of collective knowledge. Imagine what you could do if you had the whole of the internet essentially downloaded into your brain at any given time! The answers you get come as the result of lots of learning from similar situations or existing facts.

Con’s

I might have been singing their praises so far, but A.I tools are not without fault. The responses generated by A.I are often very broad, general, or repetitive. This can be remedied by using more specific prompts. For example, you can mould responses by asking the A.I to make text “shorter”, “simpler”, or even ask them to include specific details. Still, A.I responses will be without the authenticity and creativity that is leant to the content humans develop! It will be pretty obvious to your audience where there has been no human involvement. THis is especially important if your business revolves around people or working with people – trust in an individual can’t be built if they aren’t using their own voice and knowledge.

Secondly, A.I generated content, whilst based on a large pool of data, might miss key contextual clues or important information that only you, as an expert in your area or on your audience, would know about. The quality of various A.I tools can differ greatly. Being ignorant of these points might harm your brand’s image in the long term if you mindlessly use AI tools to execute your marketing strategy.

The message here is – proceed with caution. A.I tools undoubtedly have the power to enhance your marketing strategy – saving you time and potentially, money. It is important to strike a balance between A.I-generated and human-created content, ensuring that A.I tools complement your unique creativity and expertise rather than replacing it entirely. It has been proven time and time again, that customers like to invest in people and stories that they resonate with: something very difficult for the robots to replicate!

If you don’t click with A.I, but still want some support with your online marketing efforts – why not get in touch with one of our real life, friendly team members today, to see how we can help.