Last Updated on January 19, 2024 by Alex Birkett
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a bit of a hot topic, huh?
AI technology can automate mundane tasks, increase the accuracy of data-driven decisions, and provide insights that weren’t previously available.
If you don’t love it and use it now, I bet you will soon. This post is meant to serve you some inspiration on getting started.
Everything in this field is moving quickly, but this piece will cover 7 AI marketing use cases that I’ve explored to great advantage.
7 AI Marketing Use Cases to Level Up Your Program
- AI content writing
- AI image generation and design
- AI video
- Automated campaigns
- Data-driven insights
- Personalization
- AI chatbots
Editor’s note: I’m going to use some affiliate links when possible to try to earn some revenue from my content. These don’t change the opinions espoused in the content nor the style in which they are written. If I think a product sucks, I’m not going to say otherwise. This is just a bonus and a way to fund the whole operation. Anyway, enjoy the article!
1. AI content writing
AI content writing is the use case that most people are talking about today.
With ChatGPT and similar offerings, AI text generators are helping marketers of all stripes create more content, distribute and repurpose it, and improve the quality through rewriting.
I’ve written a lot about AI content, from tools to help you create content briefs like Surfer SEO to generative AI powerhouses like Jasper.
I’m most familiar with this set of tools.
Case in point: I’m using three AI tools to help me write this blog post.
I first went to Frase to build a content outline for my keyword (“AI marketing”), and then I created a Surfer SEO brief for it. I like Frase for research and Surfer for content marketing optimization.
Then I went over to Jasper, and I used the One Shot Blog Post feature to write me a first pass.
This gets me about 20-30% of the way there. Then I write the rest by hand and I use Jasper to edit it for me.
Surfer then gives me a score to optimize towards, and I usually aim for a 70+
Mind Blowing stuff, and it helps me publish at least 5X more content than I would without AI marketing tools.
I also use AI writing tools to repurpose my long form content into social media posts. This might be one of the easiest use cases for digital marketers.
People always talk about content promotion, but truth is, it takes a lot of time to repurpose for another digital marketing campaign, whether for social media posts or email marketing campaigns or something else. And traditional content marketing tools don’t really solve this.
Now, however, marketing teams can leverage an AI marketing platform to beef up their social media management efforts.
Many tools are now even including brand language optimization and management, so you can ensure each social media post is on brand.
2. AI image generation and design
AI image generators are also an incredibly popular and new technology.
DALL-E by OpenAI was the first mainstream breakthrough, but now there are tons of options.
Jasper has their own art generator called Jasper Art. Writesonic has one, too. So does Hypotenuse AI. Any AI marketing tool that does text is also either already doing images or is building it out.
My favorite, however, is Midjourney. You’ll notice I use Midjourney for almost all of my blog post header images nowadays. It’s hands down one of my favorite AI marketing tools.
Goodbye stock images 🙂 You’ll see a lot more AI powered marketing tools making images for ad campaigns, social media marketing, and landing pages.
There are also a ton of tools to help you create presentations using AI, notably Beautiful.AI, which has been out for a while. I hate creating slide decks, so I’ll gladly let machine learning take that task over for me.
Then there are also a lot of AI website builders that at least get you started creating a website (I don’t think any of them are truly great yet). Unbounce has also incorporated AI throughout their landing pages.
I haven’t tried it yet, but Galileo AI is helping UI and product designers build out interfaces using simple text prompts.
Imagine how easy it will be to build a prototype of your startup in the next few years.
3. AI video
AI video tools are also rising in popularity, the biggest being Runway.
If you’ve seen the (absolute masterpiece) movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, this scene with the rocks was done using Runway.
There are also a ton of AI video tools that help salespeople and marketers spin up videos with completely AI generated avatars delivering their script. Synthesia is the biggest of these right now.
I expect this to be a big part of marketing strategy and reaching the right target audience, as well as for sales people looking to bring a “personal touch” to their emails.
4. Automated Campaigns
One of the biggest advantages of using AI for marketing is automation.
Automated marketing campaigns allow marketers to create complex workflows that are triggered by certain events or activities.
Marketers can set up automated emails that will be sent out when a user takes a certain action on their website or follows them on social media. Automated campaigns not only save time, but they also help ensure that customers are getting relevant content at the right time.
Where does AI come in? Instead of manually detecting where automation rules could be beneficial, marketing automation platforms with AI built into the product can suggest these rules. Zapier is like the glue holding so many different rules, automations, and AI scripts together at this point.
Additionally, a lot of dedicated business automation platforms (Workato, etc.) have built AI into the core product, which detects errors and anomalies and keeps things running without breaking.
5. Data-Driven Insights
AI can also help marketers get deeper insights into their customer data by analyzing large amounts of data quickly and accurately.
You’ve got all that data. What do you do with it now? Machine learning helps you make sense of it.
Of course, predictive analytics (and “big data” for marketing analytics) has been a thing for a while. But it’s getting better and better, and it’s built into most analytics tools now (Google Analytics included).
Machine learning allows these tools to identify patterns and trends in customer behavior, which can then be used to target more effectively and optimize campaigns for better results.
AI technologies like natural language processing (NLP) enable marketers to understand what customers are saying about their products or services, as well as give them an idea of what topics they should focus on in their content marketing efforts. Predictive analytics and machine learning can also help you:
- Identify your target audience
- Optimize Google Ads rapidly
- Customize offers in content marketing
- Improve customer service and customer experience by segment identification
- Improve your influencer marketing efforts
- Optimize campaign success
Generally speaking, it’s just a game changer for giving you actionable insights in less time.
I’ve found ChatGPT wildly useful, for instance, for analyzing big chunks of qualitative data.
For example, I recently helped a client run a state of the industry survey that had a few open ended questions. I asked ChatGPT to categorize and tag the responses, which saved me at least a few hours.
I wish I had this stuff when I was doing CRO. I used to sit through hours of session replay videos, and now most session replay tools have anomaly detection algorithms built in, so you can quickly identify frustration patterns like rage clicks.
This lets you quickly uncover user experience bottlenecks and fix them or ideate A/B tests.
Ultimately, all of this should lead to a better customer experience.
6. Personalization
AI-powered personalization allows marketers to deliver tailored content and experiences based on individual customer preferences and behaviors.
This helps create more meaningful interactions with customers, which leads to higher engagement rates and conversion rates.
With AI-driven personalization, marketers can also segment customers based on different criteria like location or interests, allowing them to send more targeted messages that resonate with each audience segment.
To be clear: AI personalization has been around for a while. It was just called unsexy things like bandit algorithms, reinforcement learning, or evolutionary algorithms.
Essentially, instead of running a simple A/B test with a finite timeline, these algorithms dynamically shift traffic to the winning variant. Moreover, they can identify individual user segments that are responding better to certain variants, and then they can suggest creating a targeting rule for that segment.
This stuff is super powerful. I’d expect most marketing platforms to start building in these features. Tools like Mutiny are making this front and center in their marketing tools.
7. AI chatbots
Finally, AI chatbots. Again, not new. But more powerful now than ever before.
At the surface level, these AI chatbots are starting to be incorporated into search engines, essentially eliminating the need to sift around for quick answers. Many are using ChatGPT in place of Google, and Bing and Google have both announced their own AI search engine projects.
But for customer service, the same thing holds true. An example I recently heard was The Jordan Harbinger Show replacing their website search engine function with a chatbot.
You can train the bot on all of your documentation and get much better answers than a traditional knowledge base.
And for support, you can use AI to detect frustration patterns in the customer’s text inputs and trigger an automated routing rule where the ticket gets sent to a human.
This speeds up quick answers for most customer support tickets and escalates the tougher issues in real time, so it both provides better support as well as lowers the cost of customer support for most organizations.
Conclusion
AI is one of the most exciting technologies for today’s marketer since it offers so many new opportunities for improved efficiency and effectiveness in marketing operations.
By leveraging its capabilities, marketers can gain valuable insights from data, create more personalized experiences for their customers, and automate mundane tasks so they can focus on more strategic initiatives – ultimately leading to better results for businesses across all industries.
I mean, I also left out a ton of stuff – from optimizing pricing strategy (including dynamic pricing optimization) to developing mobile apps, keeping your valuable data clean, syncing up multiple platforms automatically, and customer journey mapping (automatically identify social media influencers and target audiences? Yes please).
Don’t get carried away with some grandiose top down AI marketing strategy. Start small by analyzing a few of your existing marketing strategies and see if an AI marketing tool can speed things up.
AI marketing tools are the norm now. Welcome to the future.