Can AI help me be a better Marketer?
It's difficult to avoid any discussions or announcements of new ways that AI is being used today in business and everyday life.
Using AI in business, specifically when it impacts a workforce can be controversial. Overall AI is here and it is consistently evolving and becoming more prevalent, more intelligent and something that cannot be ignored. For a Marketer that is unfamiliar, here are ways to start thinking about AI, its uses and how to start to dive in.
And in case you are asking, yes, I used AI to help me organize my thoughts for this post - I author my own materials but I worked with a platform to help me write the outline to get me started.
Customer Research and Targeting
I am a big proponent of building out customer personas when in the process of outlining your marketing approach and plan. Relating your messaging and targeting approach to a model really helps to not only humanize your plans but set the tone for your creative approach. While AI can be used for building out turn key programmatic media plans and segmentations plans, there still needs to be a vision for who and how you are targeting with a connection and understanding of how these consumers will react to your product. I still think this needs a personal touch. And, here is an area that AI can help save time and focus the thinking to make your plans more accurate.
There are several programs that can use algorithms with data you provide to identify customer segments. Additionally the programs will group customers based on their similarities and differences. The programs can then help assign labels to segment customers based on their lifetime value, level of loyalty or potential to become fans of your product.
An area to tap for this data is your customer feedback through reviews, sentiment and social media posts. Incidentally, there are also AI sentiment programs you can use for this to gather more customer data. Once you feed all this in and add in trend reports, time in developing customer research for targeting can be substantially reduced - giving you more time for ideation and proper development of KPIs.
Competitive Set Analysis
From simply inputting information into a AI tool about your product, you can in seconds be given a list of your competition and from there you can determine your competitive set. Now most Marketers are very familiar with their competitors already, but AI can help identify those you have not thought of or could be new to the marketplace.
This information can then be easily input back in and then organized by questions to be asked of each to help define why they are your competitors as well as identify key features that are important to consider in your own approach for branding. Next comes the cool part, again saving not only time but allowing you to optimize consistently. AI tools allow for tracking of key competitors - updating you on their brand iterations, media plan pivots, social campaigns and and other actions they take in targeting their customers.
Presentation Outlines, Process Optimization and Marketing Plan Constructs
An obvious use of AI tools is to assist with templates - request a template for media plans, marketing plans, financial plans - anything you can think of and they are spit out immediately. It’s great at times of procrastination or the opposite, when squeezed for time. I always say it's easier to edit from notes or drafts versus a blank sheet of paper. AI tools can help you with a starting point for you to customize. And then, once customized, those plans can be templates for optimizing and updating documents.
Content Ideation
When leading a team there is nothing better than group ideation sessions. It is not only fun, but it opens the team to collaborative thinking and education about different viewpoints. When a group ideation session is not an option, AI tools can be a great resource for content and experiential ideas, especially if you can use the tools as a feedback mechanism for your own ideas and then continue to build from there.
Once the content is determined AI tools can assist in providing tactical execution recommendations and then methods for optimizing the content so it continues to be fresh, adapting to topical trends and consumer actions.
Platforms and People to help you learn
There are several ways to get started with AI - the easiest is to test out these conversational chatbot assistants, just start by asking a question:
Google Bard
ChatGPT
Microsoft Bing
Amazon Code Whisperer
If you don’t want to jump in with the AI tools, here is some recommended reading to get a bit more familiar at first:
