Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are transforming the way Marketing professionals communicate, engage and influence their prospects and customers. Let's see how to utilize AI and automation in marketing to grow your business.
With the power of intelligent automation, AI features and data-driven business intelligence, you can generate substantial productivity wins, customer delight, and unlock growth opportunities.
In this article, we are covering following topics:
What are the benefits of marketing automation and AI?
Where can AI help me in Digital Marketing now? AI tools and use case.
Limitations of AI tools today
AI Ethics: How you should navigate them
AI & Marketing Automation: 4 priorities to get ready.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
What are the benefits of marketing automation and artificial intelligence.
Marketing automation is a technology designed to help marketers automate repetitive tasks.
Artificial intelligence is technology that “applies advanced analysis and logic based techniques, including machine learning to interpret events, support and automate decisions, and take actions.” (Gartner)
Marketing Automation and AI often work together, to attract and engage better your customers, to segment audiences, and to hyper-personalize your interactions with your customers.
In comparison with a manual way of working, you can complete tasks faster with AI and automation, with more accuracy, even if might take more time and money at the beginning.
Where AI can help Marketing now?
AI tools will impact the most communication, marketing and design jobs on 3 dimensions:
content creation
data capture and insights monitoring
advertising/campaigns optimization.
1. Generate basic content and enhance creativity
Chat GPT acts as a checklist provider, which you can use before writing your content. For instance, it gives recommendations on how to write a blog post that ranks well in Google and results in conversions or a great press release.
AI tools can help you generate draft content for press releases, emails, letters, blog post, social media post, images, videos, newsletters, ad copy that resonates with different audiences.
AI tools can analyse your topic, audience, tone and keywords, and produce content that matches your brand voice and style.
AI tools can help you write ads optimized for clicks and conversions using predictive technology.
You can also use AI tools to edit, proofread and optimize your content for SEO and readability.
AI tools can help you enhance your creativity by providing you with inspiration, ideas and insights for your digital campaigns.
...
A good way to start
Jasper.ai – this is an AI copywriting assistant. It covers a wide range of marketing functions like Ads Headlines and Primary Text, Company Bios, AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) copy, Problem-Agitate-Solution copy, Engaging Questions, Short Social Posts, Email Subject Lines, Content Rewriting. Free trial.
Hemingway - to check the readability score. It analyses your content and suggests where you could make it clearer, more concise, or improve your diction.
More tools we spotted for your content creation:
Few more copywriting tools:
Writesonic
copy.ai
rytr.me
Audio editing:
Descript
Adobe Podcast
Image generation:
Midjourney
Adobe Firefly
2. Monitor your topics and manage reputation
AI can help you manage your reputation by monitoring, analysing and responding to your online mentions, reviews, feedback and sentiment.
AI tools can use natural language processing and sentiment analysis to track and understand what your audience, media, competitors and influencers are saying about your brand, your products/services and your issues.
You can also use AI to respond to your online comments, questions, complaints and compliments, and build trust and loyalty with your customer base.
...
A good way to start
The AI recommendations are a good starting point for a newbie and are disappointing for experienced marketing professionals. Think of it as your assistant or a junior who can take over some of the mundane tasks/base contextual work you’d normally have to deal with yourself or things you already know as an expert in your field (draft copy, summary of trends...). You must review, check the sources, edit the draft....to add a layer of quality (point of view, story, authenticity...)
AI can help track media impressions, coverage, and analyse sentiment.
For social media marketers, you can discover high-impact influencers.
AI can help detect prospects
...
3. Campaigns optimization
AI can help you segment your audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviours, preferences and needs.
AI can help you personalize your digital campaigns by delivering the right content, at the right time, to the right person, on the right channel.
AI can analyse a collection of behaviours of your website visitors, and make recommendations based on those behaviours....
AI can also help you optimize your digital campaigns by testing, measuring and improving your results.
AI can create targeted media lists or help identify journalists most likely to be interested in a story.
AI can provide insights into how a campaign performs and make recommendations for changes.
Automated reports can help you quickly see your growth rate and team performance.
...
A good way to start
Have a top-notch CRM with AI-powered features for Marketing Automation and smart integrations, in place. AI can be utilized to instantaneously process and interpret vast amounts of data and generate reports on the spot.
Drop substandard CRMs, digital tools and marketing software.
Stop the Excel way of working and copy-pasting data sets from one tool to another, really.
Limitations of generative AI for PA today
Lack of Timeliness. The data of generic out-of-the-box AI chatbots like Chat GPT or Gemini are lot. These Gen AI tools are unsuitable for tasks demanding in-depth expertise or context.
Lack of Transparency: GenAI tools such as ChatGPT do not provide sources/citations or underlying reasoning for a response.
Lack of Accuracy: Hallucinations (answering questions with plausible but untrue assertions). Any decision made on inaccurate responses to queries could result in issues for your organisation.
Privacy and Security: Risk of leaks, unauthorized access or misuse of sensitive information.
If you expect new tactics and out-of-the-box ideas to experiment content marketing, pass your way. In all cases, critical logic must be applied to make AI generated content relevant, accurate, original.
AI Ethics: How you should navigate them
The use of ethics in AI is essential to prevent the misuse of technology. Without an ethical framework behind it, artificial intelligence can result in 3 problems.
1. Privacy and Security Concerns
It can impact the brand's credibility but also bring legal ramifications. For content creators, there is a real fear of intellectual property theft. The information AI uses to improve isn't guaranteed to be protected. The amount of personal data or strategic business data users unknowingly give away for AI solutions is an issue — and it could be using unauthorized intellectual property to work.
Without stronger ethical guidelines at EU level, it can lead to data breaches, legal conflict, and other misuses. Some companies are already banning the use of generative AI for their employees, like Samsung after spotting Chat GPT data leak. Google Bard AI is not available in the EU yet, as there are concerns that it can extract personal information leaked on the internet, and not in line with GDPR.
2. Unequal bias
Many AIs have displayed an insensitive or unfair bias against certain individuals or groups using the technology. This is one of the hottest topics in AI right now, and the solutions (and regulations) are still being forged to create an AI of trust for Europe (EU AI Act, 2024).
3. Incorrect or Incomplete Information
As a marketer, you want to keep control over your messaging. You would never risk publishing an article that you can’t trace back.
There are valid concerns about whether the results AI generates are reliable or accurate.
Chat GPT cannot access the internet to collect data in real-time and understand the world has changed since 2021.
AI does not disclose the exact sources of information it shares with users.
AI & Automation: 4 priorities to get ready
Implementing marketing automation and AI into your strategies and processes now will prepare your company for the future and help you become more customer-centric.
Automation and AI rely on quality data at the core.
Here are 4 steps you should prioritize today:
1. Evaluate all your repetitive manual tasks that you could be intelligently automate.
Automation done correctly reduces the manual work done by your team, and improves relationships with your contacts and customers. The scope of automation related to marketing, sales, operations, customer services is nowadays very large.
Think customer database centralization, email marketing campaigns, social media posting, ad campaigns, sync data between apps, workflows, funnels, tasks, invoicing, payments, event management, certifications... all these tasks can be automated in a few days or few weeks maximum (not months) by automation experts.
2. Assess your data and discover opportunities to help you leverage better your data.
Data hygiene and Data centralization are paramount. Bad quality data harms automation processes.
AI inside a great CRM can help you align all your data related to Marketing and Sales. It can help you automatically detect and remove duplicates, auto-generate relevant company information into your contacts, and automatically process conversational data.
3. Evaluate and re-organize your Tech stack.
Tech stack is the full scope of all the different software and tools you use as a marketer.
When we talk to marketers, one of their biggest challenges is getting data to flow efficiently across their Tech stack.
While evaluating your Tech stack, ask yourself these questions:
Are your data consistent, accurate, complete?
Are the current CRM, database, and marketing tools really best-in-class?
Do they talk to each other? How do they integrate? Do they sync 2 -ways or just 1-way?
Are the data flowing perfectly into your CRM?
Does all your software integrate with one another or are you having issues to use the tools together?
Where are the data hosted? In the EU or not?
It is the quality of integrations and the depth of automation that matters to lower operational costs, reduce significantly your data errors, and improve productivity.
3. Develop an internal strategy for your content.
When it comes to increasing the level of personalization in your content creation, AI+SEO based recommendations (emails, newsletters, articles, web pages, chatbot...) help you achieve better results for the business.
4. Ask Marketing Automation & Tech experts - we at Symantra are just an email away to bring your company to the next level.
More and more companies are now laying the foundation that will make those AI tools useful. And that foundation is about having a strong data strategy, an optimized digital ecosystem /tech stack, and smart automation in place.
This must be a business priority and we, at Symantra, can help you to generate substantial productivity wins by implementing Intelligent Automations, lower operational costs up to 30%, and create more impact.
Interested?
Check Symantra's new AI offering - Secure Artificial Intelligence for Enterprises. We create custom AI Chatbots for Enterprises trained on internal business knowledge and data.