If you think social media disrupted your business, get ready for the new game in town: Generative AI.
This tech is quickly changing every aspect of our businesses, from customer service to sales growth and overall productivity. Not only can we offload and automate mundane tasks to AI, but we can also get closer to automated personalized messaging than we’ve ever been able to before. AI might just be your pocket ace.
In a study by Botco.ai, nearly three-quarters of all marketing departments are using or soon plan to use generative AI. Big players like Amazon are actively building AI teams wholly focused on developing content for their merchants, making it increasingly important for your marketing and communication team to get comfortable in this space.
But if we’re being honest, luck and skill go hand in hand in digital marketing. Understanding how to leverage generative AI will help you level the playing field against bigger companies with bigger ad budgets.
These are just a few examples of how some companies are using generative AI to innovate their digital strategy:
- Better target your ideal customer.
- Optimize page layouts, ad copy and SEO strategies.
- Automate lead nurturing based on evolving customer behavior patterns.
- Support the sales process through personalized reminders and recommendations.
- Provide real-time negotiating advice and coaching to your sales teams.
- Help with customer retention and loyalty with post-purchase messaging.
5 ways you can begin using AI in your business today!
Maximizing ROI while experimenting with emerging technologies is a smart marketer’s DNA. Whether you’re launching a new brand or looking to refresh an existing one, generative AI can speed up the creative process, evaluate marketing results and recommend next steps based on how customers interacted with the content.
Here are a few ways AI can take your digital marketing to the next level:
- AI-generated text
By far the most-used AI tools involve text creation. Working with large data sets, generative AI’s natural language processing algorithms can adopt your brand tone to create compelling and unique content for your marketing emails, social media or blog posts. But it can also create clear and concise product descriptions and information guides.
While AI can’t conduct a research study on its own (yet), it can take your research or customer polls and summarize them, uncovering patterns and tailored insights you might otherwise miss.
If you’re concerned about plagiarism, don’t be. Generative AI doesn’t regurgitate existing content but instead creates new content. Even if you enter the EXACT same prompts as another user (highly unlikely), the output will be different each time.
Check out these AI text-based tools that can help:
- Personal. Serves as a digital memory.
- Byeblankpage. Delivers tailored writing prompts, editing support and coaching.
- Outboundly. Analyses digital profiles to create personalized cold outreach.
- AI generated search engine optimization and digital automation
Staying on the text theme and the enormous amount of data within generative AI models, let’s go beyond page copy and consider keyword research and meta descriptions for SEO. Take it a step further with pay-to-play AI tools and consider how SEO research can put you on par with the sharks in your industry.
- Perform, organize and prioritize keyword research.
- Suggest keyword-based blog posts and info guides.
- Group search intent content and build a content structure.
- Create SEO smart titles, subtitles anchor text and, of course, on-page copy.
Check out these AI marketing tools that can help:
- Vurvey. Accelerates marketing decisions with AI-powered insights.
- Speedybrand. SEO-optimized digital content to drive targeted traffic.
- Jasper. Everything you need to make your marketing more efficient and effective.
- AI-generated images and videos
We’re at the very beginning of unearthing the deep learning algorithms of generative AI and generative adversarial networks (GANs) and how they can automate image generation. To use these tools, you’ll need some graphic design skill but they’re evolving quickly. Here’s what they can do to help you today:
- Develop branding materials, such as logos or product icons.
- Create realistic images of products.
- Design visually engaging digital ad layouts.
- Create marketing videos and product demos.
Check out these AI text-to-image tools that can help:
- Unicornplatform. Drag and drop website builder.
- Midjourney. Requires a discord account and some geek intelligence.
- DALL-E2. An AI system that creates realistic images from natural language prompts.
- AI-generated customer service
There are some jobs that are a long way off from being replaced by a robot — but that doesn’t mean AI can’t reduce friction and improve efficiency. Conversational AI models are quickly proving they can understand and respond to customer inquiries faster than humans. They still need supervision and guardrails, but they can make your team’s job easier.
Chatbots that offer basic information 24/7.
Multilingual support to address a diverse local customer base.
Automated email responses that let customers know their inquiries are important.
Check out these AI customer service tools that can help:
- Zapier. Streamlines workflows, from simple tasks to custom processes
- Aizzy. Taps into a diverse pool of digital assistants to automate mundane tasks
- Intercom. Reduces support volumes with AI-powered chatbots and automation tools
- Follow AI-oriented thought leaders
Social media — and the internet in general — democratizes knowledge, leaving no excuse for not educating yourself on emerging tools and trends. Below are just a few marketing leaders I follow — I’d love to hear who you follow.
- Marketing against the grain. An engaging unfiltered examination of marketing trends.
- Marketing school with Neil Patel & Eric Siu. Actionable, smart digital marketing strategies.
- The digital marketing podcast. Interviews with global experts and reports on the latest digital news, tools, strategies and techniques.
- WTF (What’s the Future) Podcast. Dedicated to digital Darwinism, the evolution of technology and society.
- 100 FREE AI courses (LinkedIn). Available through June 15.
