Monica, CMO of SOCi, holds 20+ years of tenure in digital marketing & advertising, with a foundation in sales, strategy, and data analytics.
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Marketers have to be flexible. They’re regularly tasked with keeping up with quickly evolving markets. Even as budgets remain static or shrink, marketing teams are expected to do more with less while still maintaining high efficiency, championing personalization and delivering the perfect, relevant message.
This isn’t easy, but thankfully generative artificial intelligence (AI) is ushering in a new era of disruption and innovation within the tech industry that I believe is going to make marketers’ jobs a lot easier—and more fun. Many businesses have already leveraged AI to improve digital marketing to forecast product demand, develop customer profiles more fully and manage programmatic ad buying. And now, large language models like ChatGPT and Bard are revolutionizing how marketers do everything, from drafting business plans and generating reports to creating go-to-market strategies.
The data shows it’s making an impact: According to Deloitte, more than 60% of customers are open to companies using AI, especially when the technology improves customer experience (CX).
For marketers, we’ve only tapped the surface of this technology’s capabilities, and there’s much more to come. Over the next few months, I believe there are three areas where generative AI is going to unlock new ways to get work done at a scale we’ve never seen before.
1. Generating Quality Content
Optimizing online profiles through high-quality content takes time, and marketing teams regularly identify content creation as a big challenge. When given specific prompts, generative AI can write customer-focused, purposeful content for social media, emails and other customer communication in minutes versus hours.
Generative AI can also be used to optimize online profile pages by writing compelling, keyword-rich business descriptions or developing a list of FAQs with responses. It can also help develop local social post ideas and even the actual content for those posts to target local audiences.
2. Improving Customer Experiences
Being aware and responsive to online customer comments, questions and reviews are key to building authority and trustworthiness. In fact, many consumers expect to receive a response to reviews within three days. A brand responding quickly to engagements and addressing complaints can make a difference in a consumer’s buying decision, as 9 out of 10 read online reviews before making a purchase.
Generative AI can be used as a tool for responding to reviews at scale while also staying consistent with a brand’s voice. This can drastically reduce the effort and time it takes to create highly engaging content, increase review response rates and nurture customer loyalty.
3. Identifying Predictable Outcomes
Marketers are sitting on so much data that it’s a struggle to analyze and pull meaningful insights that result in data-driven decisions. Technology, with the help of AI, should help marketers by recommending the next best action, and assist them in taking the action as well. Utilizing AI to analyze data can help save CMOs and marketing teams the time and resources they would typically spend on cleaning data sets and identifying actionable insights.
AI can guide your marketing strategies and tell you exactly where to spend your time for the biggest impact in order to garner meaningful engagements with audiences. Which keywords are you making the best traction in? What markets are showing the greatest opportunity?
Marketers must harness the power of AI, ultimately helping them to be more efficient and automate time-intensive tasks they shouldn’t be spending time on anyway. Instead, reclaim that time to get back to what you love to do and what drove you to work in marketing in the first place. I’m sure it wasn’t analyzing troves of disparate data and responding to thousands of customer reviews that happen daily.
Pitfalls To Avoid
While AI has amazing potential, a word of caution: It requires a level of human oversight when used for marketing, so keep these cautions in mind as you incorporate generative AI into your strategy.
1. Bad prompting equals bad results.
The best outcomes only come with good prompting, so it’s important to keep machine learning in mind and train your software to learn to be authentic and personalized without direct instruction. For now, having oversight over these messages until the models have been trained and tested is a good idea.
2. AI is not always the most accurate.
Remember your AI might not always be pulling from up-to-date information, another reason to ensure human oversight. AI benefits the most—and is most effective—when it pulls from accurate, existing data. Practically speaking, there’s a direct correlation between data richness, relevance and timeliness, and an AI application’s capability to use it. Marketing stacks consisting of disconnected point solutions for analytics, content creation and demand generation leads to lost data, creating a roadblock for AI systems trying to access and analyze this data. Using an integrated platform to eliminate silos reduces the amount of data loss. It also eliminates delays in gathering data enabling marketing teams—with the help of AI—to act in near real time.
3. Be mindful of changing guidelines and regulations.
Some regulations exist to govern the responsible, ethical use of AI, but as the world sees its utilization evolve, governments and digital platforms will continue adjusting their guidelines and regulations. Because this technology and the rules that come with it are changing fast, marketers need to keep up with recommended guidelines and regulations to ensure compliance.
It’s clear generative AI is a potent tool that’s challenging how marketers approach, strategize and execute their marketing goals. It’s also a necessity when it comes to scaling marketing programs of fast-growing enterprises and can offer a true impact on where teams spend their time and resources. Ultimately, generative AI allows humans to get back to doing the marketing they love versus being inundated with repetitive, mundane tasks.
Adding this technology to marketers’ toolboxes empowers teams to leverage phenomenal amounts of data to tailor marketing campaigns, personalizing to deliver an exceptional CX that creates loyal customers and solid ROI.
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