Welcome to the New Frontier! With all the fancy new artificial intelligence (AI) tools, like ChatGPT, it feels a little like the Wild West has returned – and content creators are getting nervous. Will these tools make your job obsolete or will they assist you in creating better content than ever? In this blog, we’re going to take a closer look at the pros and cons of using AI for marketing.
Does the advent of AI to write articles, blogs, and create content feel a little like The Terminator, where machines have taken over? Before we can even address a question like that, we should explain a bit about what these new tools are and how they work.
What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
AI refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. The term can also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind, such as learning and problem-solving.
Put another way, AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine vision.
How Does AI Work?
As the publicity around AI has quickened, companies have been rushing to publicize how their products and services use it. Often, what they refer to as AI is simply a component of the technology, such as machine learning. AI requires a foundation of specialized hardware and software for writing and training machine learning algorithms.
Generally speaking, AI systems work by consuming large amounts of labeled training data, scrutinizing the data for correlations and patterns, and using these patterns to make predictions about future states. So, a chatbot that is fed samples of text can learn to produce lifelike interactions with people, or an image recognition tool can learn to identify and describe objects in images by reviewing millions of examples. New, rapidly improving generative AI techniques can create realistic text, images, music, and other media.
AI is based on the principle that human intelligence can be defined in a way that a machine can easily mimic it and execute tasks, from the most simple to those that are even more complex. The goals of artificial intelligence, among others, is to simulate human cognitive activity.
Researchers and developers in the field are making surprisingly rapid strides in mimicking activities such as learning, reasoning, perception, and creativity to the extent that these can be concretely delineated. Some believe that innovators may soon be able to develop systems that exceed the capacity of humans to learn or reason out any subject. But others remain skeptical because all cognitive activity is laced with value judgments that are subject to human experience.
Why Does AI Matter?
AI matters because of its capability to alter how we live, work, and play. It’s been successfully used in business to automate tasks done by humans, including customer service work, lead generation, fraud detection, and quality control. In a number of areas, AI can perform tasks much better than humans. Chiefly, when it comes to recurring, detail-oriented tasks, such as analyzing large numbers of legal documents to ensure relevant fields are filled in properly.
AI tools often complete jobs quickly and with relatively few errors. Due to the immense data sets it can process, AI can also give an organization insight into its operations it might not have been cognizant of. The quickly growing amount of generative AI tools will have an impact on diverse arenas ranging from product design to marketing and education.
Advances in AI techniques have not only helped make organizations more efficient but have unlocked the door to new business opportunities for some larger enterprises. Prior to the recent swell of AI, it would have been difficult to envision using computer software to connect riders to taxis, but Uber has become a Fortune 500 company by doing just that.
AI has become pivotal to many of today’s largest and most successful companies, including Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta, where AI technologies are used to improve operations and outpace competitors. At Alphabet subsidiary Google, for example, AI is central to its search engine, Waymo’s self-driving cars, and Google Brain, which invented the transformer neural network architecture that underpins the recent breakthroughs in natural language processing.
That’s all well and good for those huge corporations but what about you and using AI to augment your company’s marketing? Let’s take a closer look at AI, and the pros and cons we mentioned earlier.
What is AI for Marketing?
AI marketing is the use of AI technology to automate marketing tasks, improve team efficiency, and unleash creativity. Examples of what AI can do include anything from creating blog content to sending out sales emails.
AI allows organizations to improve their overall marketing endeavors. AI can automate everyday marketing tasks like scheduling and sending emails or predicting campaign performance. It also goes even further by personalizing experiences for both marketers and consumers.
Most AI content writing tools and platforms are generative AI-based, which means they are able to generate text and images based on what you ask them to create. It can do this because it’s trained on existing data from about 10% of the entire internet! Since speed, efficiency, and personalization play a big part in today’s customer journey, AI can be used to forecast demand, almost in real-time, and make smart decisions.
While AI can help speed up your marketing efforts, you should note that it’s not meant to actually replace any of your team members; it should help augment their work and processes.
Pros of Using AI for Marketing
Here are some of the benefits of AI marketing:
- Increased Efficiency – One of the greatest benefits of AI marketing is that it can help businesses improve their efficiency. By reducing the content creation process, businesses can free up time and resources that can be better spent elsewhere.
- Improved ROI – Because AI-powered marketing tools are able to provide detailed insights and data-driven recommendations, businesses can make more informed decisions about their marketing spend, leading to better results.
- Sparks Creativity – Creativity is one of the most underrated facets of marketing, but without it, ad campaigns fall flat and don’t perform. Still, it can be hard to get those creative juices flowing. AI content generators like Jasper also offer the benefit of being your brainstorming buddy; they get ideas on the page to help jumpstart your imagination.
- Better Cross-Collaboration – Instead of operating your marketing channels in silos, AI content tools can offer a central creation hub for your team to create assets that match in style and tone of voice. You can also quickly repurpose copy for all your different channels and campaigns using content templates.
Challenges of Using AI for Marketing
Most of today’s challenges with using AI come from it being so new, unfamiliar, and a little bit scary. As such, the two main challenges to adopting AI tools are getting leadership buy-in and creating processes.
Remember, not everyone has an “early adopter” mindset, which means even if you see the value AI can bring to your team, your teammates or leadership may still see it as risky or unproven. Try looking for small ways to implement AI in your workflow and speak up about the positive impact you see.
AI tools are relatively new, especially in the marketing world. When implementing a new AI content platform, it may be time-consuming to create new processes and best practices from scratch, but worth it in the end. Think ahead of time about how you’ll handle team training, project requests, best practice documentation, and ROI and performance insights.
Cons of Using AI for Marketing
The following are some of the cons of AI:
- AI is expensive.
- AI requires deep technical expertise.
- There is a limited supply of qualified workers to build AI tools.
- AI cannot think. It reflects the biases of its training data, at scale.
- AI lacks the ability to generalize from one task to another.
- AI has a human cost by eliminating jobs and increasing unemployment rates.
In Summary
When used to augment your marketing, AI helps build stronger customer relationships, drives faster decision-making, can boost campaign ROI, allows you to personalize content with customer data, and automate repetitive tasks that waste employee time.
At the same time, AI can be challenging to implement, requires new processes and training, is expensive to implement, reflects biases, and can lead to job losses.
Fancy new AI tools like ChatGPT, Anyword, and Jasper are like shiny new toys right now. Everybody sees them and goes “Ooh” and “Ahh” while also having a measure of trepidation. When used properly AI can save time and increase efficiency. It can augment, not replace, the human element in your overall marketing strategy.
Would you like to learn how we can use AI to improve your digital marketing? Let’s connect and schedule a time for a free, no-obligation, strategy session with our team of marketing experts!
