Three ways to use generative AI in marketing

I am having a lot of fun playing with Chat GPT. I like tinkering and seeing what will happen. Sometimes the results are great, and sometimes they’re a dud. Sometimes I need to refine what I’m asking and sometimes I can just do it better myself.

So far, this is what I’ve come up with in terms of the benefits of using generative AI with marketing tasks:

- It helps me do things I know how to do faster

- It can inspire me with new ideas

But there are LOTS of caveats at the moment about the limitations of this technology:

- AI makes things up – don’t rely on the facts it gives you

- AI gets things wrong – it can misinterpret things

- Free versions don’t know new stuff

- Everyone has access to it so it’s going to be the new standard

- Concerns about plagiarism are real – AI has to pull from somewhere and it’s pulling from things real people wrote so be careful there.

Here are some general tips for working with generative AI:

- You will need to fact-check everything

- You will need to proof everything

Basically, treat AI like a free intern – you will need to check their work against source material and proof it.

How to work successfully with generative AI

The key is to really know what you’re doing and what you want. The more precise your request, the better AI will work for you. If your request is vague, its response won’t be as helpful. It won’t take an intuitive leap like a human and won’t take initiative so what you put in is what you get out. It still requires work! When working with something like Chat GPT don’t be afraid of repeating the request multiple times in different iterations until you get what you want.

Below are some ways that businesses can use to help them with their marketing. It’s not an exhaustive list because I’m still learning all the ways AI can be used and it reflects the tasks I do most often, but it will give you a start.

This is a series of blogs about AI in marketing:

• How it’s likely to change the game

• Where you can strategically use it for marketing (this one)

• Specific AI tools for marketing and how to use them (upcoming)

Three Ways you can strategically use AI in your marketing

1 Marketing ideas & goal-setting

Marketing is not rocket science. There is a toolbox of marketing tactics out there that most people know about. The secret to effective marketing is which ones you choose and how you implement them. It’s WHY you’re doing them and HOW you do them that matters. And to get to the RIGHT ideas you really need to know yourself, your audience, and what you want to achieve – that’s the hard part – and often that’s what I help my clients with. Once you have that in place though, AI can help come up with ideas for things to do – but only you will know if they’re right for you or not.

Here are some ideas from AI. Now you need to evaluate them:

- Which ones do you have time to do?

- Which ones require an extra budget?

- Which ones have historically been most effective?

- Which ones do you enjoy?

AI can churn out ideas until the cows come home, but you’re the one who has to evaluate and implement them.

Equally, once you’ve picked your idea, you can ask it to help you create goals and systems.

But again, you need to decide if those goals are realistic and those systems are practical. How much advertising am I going to have to do to get 50 people to each webinar? Can I afford that? Is 50 even the right number? What’s my conversion rate for webinars to clients?

2. Copywriting

Is this the end of copywriters? The short answer is no, it’s not. As I opined in my previous article, it might get rid of mediocre and poor copywriters who are churning out copy for the algorithm, but it’s going to help good ones do better. Here are some ways I’m playing with AI when writing:

Brainstorming and inspiration

I like to ask it to come up with different versions of my titles and subject lines to see if there’s a more interesting way to phrase something. Most often I don’t use exactly what’s churned out, but I’ll riff on what it gives me if I think it’s better than my original.

Repurposing content

In the wonderful digital world we live in, a piece of content has a long lifespan. Once you have written a blog, you should promote it, on multiple platforms. You can also repurpose it into a downloadable guide, video, email, or presentation. Sometimes it can be tiring to come up with 50 different ways of saying the same thing, so that’s where I like AI to give me a head start.

Again, I’ll caveat this by saying you need to know exactly what you want from AI. If the different platforms you’re promoting content on need a different tone of voice – specify that. The first step in that is knowing what your tone of voice is for your audience in each context (more strategic thinking).

Summaries and research

- If there’s a long article I don’t want to read in full but I want to see if there’s something useful in there for me, I’ll ask the AI bot to summarize it for me. It might miss some details but I’ll get the general gist and see if there are sections I want to read in more depth.

- You can also use AI transcribers to transcribe videos so you don’t need to watch the whole thing. Then, you can plug that transcription into another AI and ask it to summarize the video. When I don’t have time to watch a 20-minute video for 30 seconds of information, this can be a great way to extract what I need.

In general, I STRONGLY discourage you from asking AI to churn out whole blogs for you and just using that. This is because of:

- Plagiarism risks

- AI mistakes

- Generally mediocre content

If you’re going to spend time creating something, you want it to mean something and be useful to clients. It’s a waste of time and money to create exactly the same thing as everyone else – you want to put your unique spin on it to stand out from the sea of sameness around you.

Moreover, Google values expertise and demonstrable value. If you’re churning out the same AI blogs that everyone has access to, that’s not going to help you differentiate yourself.

3. SEO

Once you have your content ready for your blog or website page, you need to create metadata to accompany it (how Google searches the back end of your website). This isn’t a difficult task, but on a busy day, why not have someone else do the heavy lifting for you?

I may update this blog over time as I uncover more ways to use generative AI in my business. Essentially what I’m finding is that it can help me do certain tasks faster, but I still need to know what I want the result from it to be and how to get there without it.

What about you? How have you been using generative AI in your marketing tasks?

I also have another blog about AI if you'd like to read it - AI - marketing tool or game-changer? (Spoiler - it's both)