The Role of AI in Marketing

The Role of AI in Marketing

With the rise of websites like ChatGPT and Google’s AI products being discussed and utilized, I am often asked how AI should play a role in marketing. This is a great question and one that should be thoughtfully answered.

To start, I don’t think AI is in a position to replace human marketers.  After all, AI is smart but does indeed have its kinks and can’t always be trusted.  Turning your marketing over to AI would be like turning 100% of your housekeeping duties over to a teenager.  It might be fun to think of this as a possibility for a while you do less housework, and your teenager works overtime giving you time back to do whatever tired people do these days.  Alas, the result is likely not going to be what you would normally expect from yourself.  The laundry might pile up and just become too much.  Heck, you might even find that the dishes have been put in the wrong place leaving you with only more work to do to reconfigure your kitchen and re-stain the bathtub after that, you know, scrubbing disaster. But I digress… 

For me and the DMA team, we use AI to help us steer marketing in the right direction.  Does it completely replace our ability to write content, like this blog post, or social media posts?  No, it does not.  But does it get our creative minds going and does it help guide us to answers we seek often?  Yes, it does.

From an efficiency and data perspective, AI can’t be beat.  I’ll explain here along with many other reasons why and how we integrate AI in our marketing process at DMA:

  1. Data Analysis and Insights: AI can analyze vast amounts of consumer data to identify trends, preferences, and behaviors, allowing marketers to write informed copy and make statements with teeth that target audiences want (and need) to hear.  I do offer a bit of advice, however.  AI is not always accurate, so marketers are encouraged to follow up on cues given by an AI generator to make sure the data is accurate, recent, and contextually sound.
  2. Automation: AI doesn’t always present itself as ChatGPT.  In fact, at DMA, we’ve been using AI to help us automate email marketing for years, particularly for this blog! AI takes time and errors a lot of the time out of the equation when repetitive tasks, such as email marketing and social media posting are all able to be scheduled ahead of time.  This allows marketers more time to analyze and shift strategies to connect with target audiences precisely where they want to be connected to.
  3. Chatbots and Customer Service: Along similar lines to automation, AI-powered chatbots provide instant responses to customer inquiries, enhancing user experience and engagement.  You can see an example of this in action on a produce company website at https://www.dudafresh.com/. Duda uses automation for customer service and to collect data from website visitors to help with re-marketing efforts.
  4. Personalization: Speaking of collecting data, AI algorithms should help tailor marketing messages and product recommendations to individual customers, improving engagement and conversion rates. We’ve found this to be true when utilizing AI to aid with list segmentation to define more targeted audiences based on preferences we’ve collected over the years. 
  5. Content Creation: If you’re anything like us and write hundreds of social media captions per month, perhaps you’d like to use AI to assist you in generating ideas for content.  One of our favorite questions to ask ChatGPT is, “What are X ways to cook XYZ products?”  AI will not only give you ideas, but it will populate the answers based on data collected across the internet which is most liked by consumers.  If you’re not already using AI for content generation ideas, what are you waiting for?
  6. Advertising Targeting: Whether or not you’re aware, AI is the engine improving our advertising targeting on the multiple channels and forms of media we use to promote brands.  First, AI analyzes user behavior and preferences, ensuring that our ads reach the most relevant audiences while they’re running.  If we’re going to recommend that you spend money on advertising, we want to know the effort is going to yield a positive result and this could not be achieved without AI to guide media platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, X, TikTok and more!
  7. Sentiment Analysis: Ok, this might be my favorite thing about AI. Today, AI tools can analyze customer feedback and social media interactions to gauge sentiment toward brands and products. For example, in Sprout Social, using AI as its backbone, the software reports the overall sentiment of products that you care about measuring and allows you to dig deeper into keywords used “more” or “less” often when a product is mentioned or discussed online.  How about that for a helpful tip?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy AI is here to stay and scared a little about how powerful and “robot apocalypse” -ish this time in our lives is becoming.  However, as a marketer, while AI is here to stay, I intend to use it to help my clients’ brands grow while we still have traditional marketing jobs that require creativity and discernment each day. If you have a traditional job like this and would like to learn how you might apply some of these useful AI tips, feel free to contact us for a free marketing consultation at info@dma-solutions.com.