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Unlocking the Power of AI in Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide

Published August 24, 2023
/ Updated April 24, 2024

AI Marketing is no longer a buzzword — it’s a crucial part of your marketing strategy. With the help of AI, you can automate repetitive tasks, spark inspiration, and analyze data.

In this blog post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about AI marketing — what it is, how to implement it, and examples.

Basics Of AI In Marketing

AI marketing is when marketers use artificial intelligence to generate ideas, understand customers, and create better content. For example, if you use a free AI headline generator to brainstorm ideas for your next article, you’re applying AI in marketing.

Today, marketers are using AI marketing tools to:

  • Generate and polish new content (like making LinkedIn post hooks more engaging)
  • Automate repetitive tasks (like scheduling social media and newsletter content)
  • Optimize marketing campaigns (like automating ad placement to maximize ROI)
  • …And so much more

AI marketing is still in its early stages, and it’s changing the face of how marketers practiced and implemented their marketing strategies, fast.

Pros & Cons Of AI Marketing

AI marketing has both positives and negatives. The advantages of AI marketing include:

1. AI Marketing Makes You More Efficient

AI can do some tasks in much less time than a marketer can. For example, AI is better suited for the job if you want to analyze heaps of data to find actionable insights. It’s more accurate and can do the job faster.

2. AI Marketing Helps You Personalize Customer Messages & Recommendations

Netflix knows just the show you’d love to watch because predictive analysis can help it understand what you like. Similarly, you can use AI in marketing to deliver customized messages and provide personalized service at scale.

3. AI Marketing Helps You Optimize Your Campaigns

Imagine having 24*7 helpers to monitor your data, make personalized predictions, and give insights into what messages resonate with your target audience. AI marketing tools can help you do just that. It analyzes data and predicts customer behavior that can increase your ROI.

But all the benefits aren’t without their cost. Here are some disadvantages of AI marketing:

1. Lack Of Privacy

AI marketing tools are trained on customer data — which can result in data privacy and security concerns among your buyers. You must be transparent with your customers about how you collect and use their data and meet your industry’s legal requirements to use AI in marketing.

2. Lack Of Accuracy

No AI tool is perfect. For example, ChatGPT was in the news for generating fake references. All AI tools are trained on the data they are fed. AI marketing tools will throw inaccurate and biased results if the source data is disproportionately representative or incorrect. You always have to fact-check the data given by any AI tool.

3. Lack Of Creativity

AI is incredibly productive, but it’s not human. It can’t understand feelings, connect the dots, and articulate fresh thoughts. The best use case for AI marketing is data analysis and automating tasks. AI can only help you hit the ground running and develop new ideas, but it’s not a replacement for thinking independently and speaking from experience. The most you can do to make up for its lack of creativity is learn prompting, like creative ChatGPT prompts, to extract the best results from the tool.

How To Integrate AI Into Your Marketing Efforts (3 Ways)

There are many innovative ways to use AI in your marketing efforts. As your team matures and learns the capabilities of the AI tools in your tech stack, you can do more and more with the tools.

1. Run Personalized Marketing Campaigns

Use AI tools to collect and examine customer data and deliver exactly what they need. For example, you could use a tool like Segment with AI features to review your customer’s profiles and segment them properly based on their needs. For instance, a high-touch customer might need different messaging than a low-touch customer.

An example: Sales software, Apollo, (likely) segments its customer list based on product usage. When they noticed I hadn’t logged in for a while, their email marketing software triggered an email sequence asking for feedback.

 

This is an excellent example of running personalized marketing campaigns, because it’s specifically targeted to the user and their past behavior. The best part is that it required minimal to no human intervention after the email sequence was set up.

2. Use Predictive Content Analytics To Create Content That Resonates

AI marketing tools can process vast amounts of data to provide you with valuable customer information that you can use to create better content. Let’s say you use an AI marketing tool to examine reading patterns — when readers bounce, which webpage they spend most of their time on, and what type of content they interact with the most.

For example, Zouk tracked when I left some items in my cart. They triggered an email after a while, nudging me to finish the purchase and giving an additional discount as the final push.

 

This is a very simplified version of what AI content marketing (combined with an email strategy) can look like. You can even use AI email subject line testers to improve this email further. AI tools have advanced machine learning models to help you track more nuances in your data and accomplish significant results.

3. Take Your Social Media Game Up A Notch

The breadth of what AI marketing tools can do for social media is endless. From writing better YouTube titles using AI to using AI to improve your social messages — the scope is pretty wide.

AI can do whatever you need in your social media marketing: scheduling posts, providing quantitative insights, replying to DMs, editing images, and even generating catchy captions.

 

To start with, use AI marketing to polish your captions, hooks, and headlines. Once that’s embedded in your workflow, start creative prompting to get ideas for a new post.

5 AI Marketing Examples

All’s good in theory, but what about when it comes to implementation? Here are three AI marketing examples (with the right tools) to inspire you:

1. CoSchedule’s Mia AI Tool

Mia is CoSchedule’s Marketing Intelligence Assistant. Using it, you can generate blog posts, title ideas, social media captions, and more. For example, let’s say you want to write the first draft of a blog post but your inspiration is running dry. Use Mia’s blog post generator to whip up a first draft in minutes.

 

And that’s not all: Mia is extremely versatile. You can ask it to create a blog post outline, share podcast episode title ideas, or even generate a headline for your ad.

2. Headline Analyzer

Writing a clever headline isn’t enough. You also need to optimize it for SEO — whether for Google, YouTube, or TikTok. Using CoSchedue’s AI headline analyzer, you can test whether your headline meets the ideal requirements and understand how to improve.

 

The Headline Analyzer doesn’t just score blogs; it’s also handy for ensuring your YouTube video & podcast titles are SEO-friendly and enticing.

Recommended Reading: How To Use AI For SEO: A Comprehensive Guide

3. Buffer’s AI Assistant

Buffer’s AI assistant is perfect for writing and reworking your social media captions. You can brainstorm post ideas and repurpose posts and ask the AI tool to shorten, rephrase, or expand on your caption.

 

Buffer is also continually expanding on the capabilities of its AI feature. You can use the tool for all your social media management needs — having AI embedded in it is a great plus.

4. Brand24

Brand24 is an AI social listening tool that helps you track mentions across social media, news outlets, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, and more.

 

You can use Brand24 to keep your ear to the ground and access customer insights from various sources. It also helps you stay on your toes regarding tracking what customers say about your brand. You’ll never miss a beat.

5. ManyChat

ManyChat is an AI chatbot tool mainly focusing on Facebook Messenger, Instagram messages, and WhatsApp. You can use it to convert more followers and set up a social media message funnel.

 

ManyChat is excellent for automatically replying to customers on social media, sharing discount codes, running online contests, and providing faster service. Its AI assistant also has plug-and-play templates to set up your message sequence.

Despite the buzz around AI, it hasn’t reached its peak yet and will continue to grow and embed more and more into a marketer’s everyday tasks. Here are three upcoming trends you can expect from AI marketing:

1. Advanced Predictive Analysis

Predictive analytics help you examine customer data and predict customer behavior. While AI marketing is already doing that, it’ll get more and more advanced. This translates to more accurate product recommendations and a better understanding of what your customers would like to see from you.

2. Interactive Experiences Using Augmented Reality (AR) & Virtual Reality (VR)

The AR and VR capabilities help brands interact more with customers. Many brands today are already leveraging the power of AI marketing to introduce virtual try-ons and tours of products and services. This will become more and more commonplace for small and large brands alike.

3. Better Ads Using AI

AI advertising tools can help you target your ads more effectively, determine which copy & visual assets perform best, and tweak your ads for peak performance. The capabilities are continually maturing and will help you improve the ROI of your ads as a marketer.

Conclusion

Many marketers speculate AI marketing will slash their jobs, produce boring content, and change the trajectory of marketing as we know it for the worse. But the truth is AI marketing will be an asset to create better content and improve the ROI if used correctly.

It’s best to start slowly and embed AI marketing into parts of your workflow that you find tedious. Don’t like posting manually? Get a social media scheduler. Hate coming up with catchy titles? Use an AI marketing tool to get the creative juices flowing. Once you see how AI marketing can help you become a better marketer, believing in its capabilities is easier without feeling threatened.