matt higgins

AI is one of the hottest topics, not just in marketing, but in business, government, and personal lives. It’s impacting everything, and at times AI is amazing and at times it’s undeniably controversial. So where does AI fit in with marketing? Is it the answer for everything or is marketing not the place for AI?

With so much of marketing being digital, from designing box art to delivering multi-channel paid social campaign, it’s pretty hard to not recognize the current biggest digital innovation definitely has its place in marketing. Here are some ways AI is being used every day in marketing:

Research: AI is highly useful for gathering information. AI is a search engine on steroids. Where AI is great is instead of searching, say, ‘what social media platform do college students use most?’ and getting hundreds of websites with good content matches that you then have to comb through and form your answers. Traditional search engines provide the resources, but AI does the work. That social platform question is a really simplistic example, but the point is AI provides useable answers. It’s a huge timesaver. The weakness here is the same for search engines: just because it’s on the internet doesn’t make it true.

It’s worth noting the line between traditional search and AI has already been blurred and the line will simply disappear in the very near future.

Brainstorming: have five great marketing ideas for a new product launch but want 20? AI’s got you. Not only will you get more ideas in a few seconds, but AI will also provide context and expanded information. Again, AI is a great timesaver, but here it helps you make sure you don’t miss some opportunities.

What AI isn’t good at is original ideas. AI isn’t truly creative. AI doesn’t sit and daydream, use its imagination, and have ideas materialize seemingly out of nowhere. AI isn’t going to have a group idea-sharing session with fellow creative coworkers. Marketing takes creativity. AI doesn’t really provide creativity. The cynical way to look at it is AI is the ultimate plagiarizer. The optimistic take is AI uses the massive resource of internet as its source material to create amazing content incredibly quickly.

Proofreading: a good copy editor is worth his or her proverbial weight in gold. Another great proofreading method is a group read aloud. But AI is also simply amazing at proofreading.

Keep in mind proofreading, editing, and rewrites are all different. When you lean too far into letting AI rewrite your creative content, you lose voice and start to sound like everyone else and that’s bad branding. Even using AI to edit is risky. AI seems to struggle with what editing is and favors too much rewriting.

The solution is to, first, give your preferred AI platform access to your content. This means creating an account and, most likely, using a paid account. Second, improve the prompts you use and be as specific as possible. Remember, you’re the only one actually thinking. The better you get at your prompts (aka instructions), the better AI will get at helping you create quality content that is on brand. Third, while you don’t want to reintroduce new typos, you, the human, need to be the last set of eyes. What AI wrote might sound great, but does it sound like your brand?

Data & Routine Tasks: AI, with the right prompts, can perform many routine tasks that typically consume a lot of time. For example, AI can, with a few necessary details, fill out most of a new marketing brief. You’ll need to finish the document and take ownership of all the information in it, but AI can save some time by filling certain sections.

AI is a master of data. What it lacks in creativity and authenticity, it more than makes up for as an analytical tool. AI can also create and update dashboards using raw data. If your organization doesn’t have the tools in place to have this automated, AI gives you back hours you might have spent updating graphs and tables.

What AI is NOT good for: stay away from creating content completely from scratch. While people use it for this a lot, it’s probably the last thing you want to let AI do for your brand. Creating copy, graphics, and images from scratch via AI is usually extremely obvious and it’s usually obviously bad. It’s called AI slop for a reason. AI is a great tool for a graphic designer, but it doesn’t replace a graphic designer. AI can definitely help improve copy, but it shouldn’t be the singular source of your copy, or your brand will have no voice. Again, it’s a great tool for helping in the process of copy creation, but it shouldn’t be your single source for copy.

As mentioned above, AI isn’t good at being creative, which is a huge part of marketing. What AI is excellent at is being an effort multiplier.