We’ve covered a lot of topics related to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Perhaps you’re wondering, though, what are my next steps if I want to adopt AI in my own digital marketing strategy?
While we can’t tell you what you should do, we can provide examples of how other digital marketers are using AI for marketing today.
In this post, we’ll break down how companies are using AI for marketing. This includes freelance digital marketers, as well as in-house marketers and digital marketing agencies. These examples can provide inspiration for you as you begin to incorporate AI into your current marketing strategy.
Why Use AI In a Marketing Strategy?
There are many reasons to use AI in your marketing strategy. Since this article focuses more on the how than the why, we’ll focus on one of the most compelling reasons: automation.
As digital marketers, it can sometimes feel like our list of tasks is ever-growing. There’s always a new medium to deliver content or a new social media platform to trend on.
The truth is that we simply can’t hit all of the marks without a little help. That’s where AI comes in.
AI has the ability to automate so many of a marketer’s repetitive tasks. From scheduling meetings and appointments to reporting on campaign metrics to optimizing the placement and timing of advertising campaigns. With the right set of tools, AI can do all of that for your business, and more.
The Data On How Marketers Are Using AI
To learn how marketers are using AI, we surveyed 1,000 digital marketers in the industry. This included those who actively work in digital marketing within the United States, whether they are freelancers, in-house marketers, or agency marketers.
Of the 1,000 marketers we surveyed, 209 of them are already using AI in their marketing strategies. The results below show how likely the respondents felt regarding the future use of AI in their businesses.
One item that is driving a lot of these reactions is likely comfort level with these AI tools. When we talked to freelancers, in-house marketers, and agency marketers, each had different comfort levels they felt with integrating AI into their campaigns:
Freelancers:
- 46.72% said they felt comfortable integrating AI into their campaigns
- 27.51% said they were somewhat comfortable
- 25.76% said they were not comfortable
In-house marketers:
- 39.1% said they felt comfortable integrating AI into their campaigns
- 33% said they were somewhat comfortable
- 27.9% said they were not comfortable
Agency marketers:
- 37% said they felt comfortable integrating AI into their campaigns
- 34.75% said they were somewhat comfortable
- 27.59% said they were not comfortable
In all three cases, more people felt comfortable than anything else, but we do see some variance, like freelancers feeling the most comfortable of all 3 groups. This may potentially be because a marketer working on their own may be the most excited over the time-saving potential of AI tools, and also have the least barriers to entry in terms of procedures.
Creating Partial Content
Not all digital marketers are comfortable with using AI to create whole content.
Using AI to create partial content is a happy medium. It still saves you time and effort, but it also helps you to avoid many of the perceived drawbacks to using AI such as fear of Google penalization or lack of a human “voice.”
So what’s included in partial content?
In specific, we’re talking about sections of a larger piece of content like a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section or a paragraph.
This is possible with AI copywriting tools like the Ubersuggest AI writer.
So what digital marketers are using AI to create partial content?
According to our survey respondents, that’s the number one way that both in-house marketers and digital agency marketers are utilizing AI.
Creating Whole Content
If you were to ask many digital marketers what one of their greatest time commitments was, it would likely be content creation. From articles and blog posts to white papers and e-books, creating whole content takes significant time and effort.
That’s why it comes as no surprise that many of our survey respondents indicated that they were currently using AI technology as a way to create whole content.
In particular, our freelance and in-house respondents both chose that as their number two way of utilizing AI.
If using AI to create whole content makes you feel uneasy about job security, just remember that humans are still needed for many aspects of digital marketing. For example, we still need to make AI content sound more human.
Making AI content sound more human is an essential component if you plan to use AI as part of your marketing efforts. Using tools like Undetectable AI with its ability to humanize AI-generated texts and make them bypass AI detectors is a great start for folks looking to scale their content strategy.
Assisting With Research
Perhaps just as time-consuming as the content creation itself is the research.
From sourcing reliable information to organizing it into what will eventually be an outline, research can take hours of precious time. This is especially true for one-man operations like freelancers.
Perhaps that’s why freelance respondents to our survey said that assisting with research was their number one use case for AI technology.
What does this look like exactly?
AI research tools, like Bit.ai, enable you and your teams to collect data, documents, and notes in one place. It also supports live collaboration, whether you’re together or across the globe. Take it one step further with Semantic Scholar, an AI tool that enables you to quickly peruse, save, and even get notifications on research papers based on keywords, author names, or even broad subjects.
Assisting With Outlines
Now that you’ve chosen your topic and collected your research, it’s time to piece it together. You want your content to make sense, to both humans and search engine crawl bots.
In-house marketing teams and digital agencies likely have pretty solid outline processes in place. What about freelancers?
Freelance digital marketers are likely working with multiple clients, all of who may have their own outline procedures and requirements. This can take a considerable amount of time and effort to manage.
It makes sense, then, that our freelance survey respondents were the only ones to mention using AI to assist with outlines. In fact, they listed this as their number three use case behind assisting with research (number one) and creating whole content (number two).
Topic Creation/Brainstorming
In the earliest stages of content creation is the brainstorming process. After all, you can’t create content if you don’t have a topic idea to begin with.
For freelancers and digital agency marketers, they likely receive a lot of input from their clientele. While they may not always receive specific topic ideas, they, at least, are given parameters that can help them to narrow their focus.
If you think about it, in-house marketing teams are really the ones directing the ship. They are unlikely to have an outside source, like a client, who sends them a list of topics or suggested topics for content creation.
That’s probably why in-house marketers were the only ones to mention topic creation/brainstorming as a way that they utilize AI.
Helping With Reporting
Data is helpful in many ways. When you have too much of it, though, trying to digest it and then turning it around to use in a helpful way can be daunting.
Just imagine how daunting it would be with dozens, if not hundreds, of clients.
That’s not typically a problem for freelancers or in-house marketers who either have a smaller client list (freelancers) or an in-house reporting suite (in-house marketers). That’s likely why neither of those groups identified “helping with reporting” as something they utilize AI for.
Agency marketers, on the other hand, identified reporting as their number two use case for AI (tied with editing assistance and schema creation).
Editing Assistance
When you’re outputting work on a large scale, you have to up-scale your editing processes. After all, accuracy and readability are important.
What better way to up-scale your processes than with AI?
Tools like Grammarly and Hemingway make it easier than ever to proofread and edit thousands of words in minutes. Such tools likely give marketers back hours of their time each week, which is likely why agency marketers identified “editing assistance” as one of their number two AI tool use cases.
Schema Creation
Schema markup is an important piece of any digital marketing strategy, making it possible to tell search engines exactly what the content on your page is and what it does. While schema creation for one or five or ten articles per week is pretty manageable, doing so on a larger scale can seem impossible.
That’s why agency marketers in our survey indicated schema creation as another of their number two use cases for AI.
Just imagine all of the time that agencies can save by automating the process with AI tools!
Finding the AI Marketing Strategy for You
When it comes to adopting AI into your marketing strategy, it’s all about what works best for you and your business.
There is no need to shoehorn AI into your business where it just doesn’t fit.
What do I mean by that?
Let’s say that writing content isn’t currently one of your biggest pain points as a digital marketer. Perhaps you have a dedicated copywriter on your team, or maybe you have a backlog of blog posts still waiting to be published.
If that’s the case, then using AI for writing content doesn’t make sense for you.
That’s okay, there are plenty of ways AI can help otherwise.
Maybe you don’t have the time you’d like to dedicate to managing your social media campaigns. There are AI tools that can not only report on your marketing campaigns, but even optimize them for placement, timing, and even run A/B tests on copy and images.
There are other cases where AI tools may not be where they need to be yet for you to feel fully secure in using them. For example, in settings where legal or medical review are common, you may want a more stringent look at any content than what AI can provide.
Remember that AI is a tool to help you. So fit it in where you need it most and you’re sure to reap the benefits. However, it also pays to keep an eye on these tools as they develop, as the ways they can help you are likely to grow.
FAQs
Do you have more questions about how companies are using AI for marketing? We have the answers to those frequently asked questions.
Chat bots, a form of artificial intelligence, are a common occurrence on business websites. Other examples within marketing include ad targeting, dynamic pricing, and ChatGPT.
The greatest impact that AI has had on the marketing industry is in the automation of repetitive tasks. This frees up times for digital marketers to focus on larger-scale projects and higher level strategy.
The greatest advantage of using AI in digital marketing is automation. This saves you both time and money. Other advantages include faster, data-driven decision making and enhanced personalization of internal processes and customer interactions.
AI tools, in and of themselves, are nothing to be feared. There is nothing inherently bad about AI or AI tools. However, you do want to review any work that comes out of them to avoid concerns like plagiarism or inaccuracy.
Conclusion
When it comes to adopting new technologies, there are always questions and concerns. In particular, how can you or your company use this technology?
When it comes to AI technology, the answer isn’t so cut and dry.
The breadth of AI tools means that AI can be used by your company in a wide variety of ways. Hopefully, the examples above from our survey respondents will give you some inspiration when it comes to utilizing AI yourself.
How are you using AI for marketing?
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