Is your marketing team tired of hearing about AI? To some extent, we all are. It’s part of the hype cycle of any new technology.
Marketing teams now find themselves surrounded by AI. It’s coming from every direction. Most notably, it was the introduction of ChatGPT that put AI in the hands of just about anyone who wanted to use it.
But ChatGPT is far from the only AI game in town. There are now countless AI-powered tools available for marketers to help boost productivity, automate manual tasks, analyze data and more.
Fortunately for marketers and business users in other areas of the business, software vendors are moving fast to incorporate AI into their existing applications. That means adopting AI will require less ripping and replacing of tools and begging for budget compared to other new technologies.
Infusing applications with AI also means the AI assistants and co-pilots we see now are likely to become just another part of the functionality of our martech platforms in due time. There’s also the likelihood of consolidation in the AI space, as well as the continued introduction of tools designed specifically for industries like marketing. It’s all part of the technology lifecycle.
Right now, marketers have no shortage of AI options to sort through, either as standalone apps or as functionality in their existing stack. The AI-powered tools your team uses depend on what they’re trying to do and the access they have to the tools that will help them do it.
Where available, we’ve linked vendor mentions in this article to video examples of the AI capabilities built into their tools.
Dig deeper: 3 ways B2B marketers can use generative AI
Benefits of AI for marketing organizations
According to a survey by The Conference Board and Ragan Communications, 68% of marketers are using AI at least “sometimes” in their daily work. That’s no surprise. Many marketers proudly compare themselves to “Swiss Army knives” — moving from task to task, from working with data to creating content. That means regularly turning to any number of AI-powered tools and features to help get it all done.
At a high level, there are three benefits your marketing team will gain by working with AI:
- Improved efficiency.
- Enhanced targeting.
- Increased ROI.
Improved efficiency
How many of the things that you do daily can be done faster with a little help from AI? We’re all guilty of spending a significant portion of our time managing our calendars, messaging apps and meetings instead of doing the work we need to do.
AI assistants like Motion and Clockwise will help you manage your calendar and to-do lists, freeing up that time for valuable work. Jasper will help with researching and creating copy for campaigns and social media posts. Grain will help you take better notes in meetings. These are important tasks in the day-to-day of the average marketer, but they tend to consume more time than the value they deliver.
Enhanced targeting
When you combine AI with predictive analytics you enable deeper, faster segmentation of customer data. AI will help classify customers into the right target groups or personas based on the data you’ve collected. AI will even help you plan the next offer, action or step in their customer journey.
Customer data platforms (CDPs) are rapidly adding AI capabilities to provide better insight into customer preferences and activities.
Increased ROI
When you combine AI’s ability to increase efficiency by automating manual tasks and its ability to make faster decisions about targeting and audience segmentation, you see an improvement in the overall return on investment (ROI) in marketing, both marketing technology and people.
As vendors add more AI functionality to martech tools — and eventually create AI-powered user interfaces — marketing teams will move faster, getting more out of their technology and their people.
Let’s examine specific use cases for AI in marketing.
Dig deeper: 6 ways to use generative AI for your marketing
Marketing copywriting with AI
Writing copy for ads, social media, email and more is a daily task for many marketers. Each of these tactics has different requirements in terms of length, tone and function. Developing a solid idea, iterating your way through different versions and applying the winners to each tactic or channel takes time. An AI-powered tool like ChatGPT or Jasper can help.
Many of the AI tools that help marketers create copy function somewhat like therapists, especially if you’re struggling to find a winning idea. Simply explain to the bot details about your product, your target audience, the tone of the message and any limitations on characters or word count. At the very least, these tools will help you get started.
It also helps to tell generative AI tools about the role they’re performing as part of the prompt. Start your prompt with something like, “You are a copywriter for a B2B marketing team…” so the bot understands its role in your process. Then add information about the audience, the offer and the action you want readers to take — download, call, apply, etc.
Generative AI tools will help you iterate faster, opening up possibilities for testing and, most importantly, saving time. But be aware the bot might take some liberties with the information you supply, so read the copy it returns carefully to make sure it’s not making claims you can’t support or creating product features that don’t exist.
Generative AI tools can also be quite a bit formulaic in their responses. If you notice that all of your LinkedIn posts created by generative AI tools follow the same structure, tweak your prompt and provide clear instructions to dictate a new format.
Data analysis with AI
Today’s marketers are surrounded by data. It’s the result of campaign measurement, lead gen reports, email marketing campaigns and website forms. Without tools to help your team make sense of the data, it’s largely useless.
Equally problematic, however, is how long it can take to analyze large datasets. The time it takes to develop insights is time spent without putting those insights to work. As discussed earlier, AI will help your marketing team automate several time-consuming manual tasks. Data analysis is another example where AI works as an accelerant.
ChatGPT is a generative AI tool, and one of the things it can generate is data analysis. But ChatGPT is a text-based tool, so your inputs and outputs will be in a text format. Fortunately for marketers like you, AI is coming to the platforms where you store and analyze your data.
Tableau introduced Tableau Pulse early in 2024 to make AI-driven capabilities more accessible to users, even those with limited experience with data visualization platforms and AI.
Microsoft is bringing AI-powered capabilities to its Power BI and Excel products to make complex analysis easier for users.
Google’s Looker helps turn large datasets into easy-to-digest visual reports and dashboards.
Your existing data analytics tools are likely your best bet for finding AI-infused functionality. These tools are already familiar to your team, so before building the business case for shiny new objects, see what’s available in-house now or is coming soon from your vendor’s roadmap.
Other applications of AI in marketing
We’re seeing AI turn up just about everywhere in the marketing stack. In addition to the examples listed above, you’ll also find AI functionality helping marketers with:
Graphic design
AI-powered image generation and manipulation is becoming widespread. Popular platforms like Canva have added AI functionality that helps marketers handle some design tasks while saving those always precious professional design resources for more valuable projects.
Software integrations
Need to connect different sources of data in your marketing stack? Marketers have long turned to tools like Zapier to easily connect applications. As MarTech contributor Milt Hwang demonstrated, Zapier’s AI-enhanced user interface makes these integrations as simple as describing what you want the tools to do.
Customer experience
The downfall of many CRM implementations is that data goes in but it rarely comes out as often as it should. AI is going to help change that because we’re no longer relying on humans to know what’s in the CRM. Salesforce’s Einstein AI is turning the data in the CRM into hyper-personalized experiences.
Where will AI make the most impact on your team?
How your team ultimately uses AI will depend on where it needs the resources and which processes are consuming the most time. We could all benefit from faster insights, and if your team is short on analytics talent, then AI can help fill that gap. The same goes for content creation or design work.
For marketing leaders, it’s important to understand how your team is using AI. In years past, the introduction of cloud-based applications led to “shadow IT,” where teams and employees were adding applications on their own, faster than the IT organization and information security teams could keep up.
Don’t allow AI use to grow in the shadows and increase risk. Embrace its use and turn it into a strategic advantage.
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