How AI is Changing the Game for Marketers
AI is everywhere, it’s unavoidable. And whilst there may be perceived negatives to the advancements in AI technology, there are positives too. Digital Marketing covers a wide base of skills and practices from copywriting for social media platforms or email campaigns, idea generation, paid advertisements, website design, CRM management, data analysis, and so on.
Digital Marketers are often expected to wear many hats, juggling multiple skills simultaneously, but no one is perfect at everything. Forget being perfect, no one is even good at everything. And the things we are good at have taken time to master and continue to take more time to put into practice. With the power of AI, a Digital Marketer’s life could be made just that little bit easier, or a HUGE bit easier. AI allows us to complete tasks quicker, move through workloads faster, and launch campaigns sooner. In fact, I could have used AI to write this blog for me if I wanted (but I promise I didn’t).
There are constant advancements in AI and a multitude of variations to pick from, but how can they help Digital Marketers?
Social Media
Suppose your company has social media profiles (who doesn’t nowadays). In that case, it is very time-consuming to plan your social calendars, generate content ideas, create visuals, write copy, schedule posts, and review analytics. With the help of AI, this process can be made more efficient by allowing it to think for you. Take idea generation for example – write a prompt for the AI technology of your choice and watch it pull together a list of ideas by scouring the internet for information. See an example in the screenshot here:
As you can see, the AI tool took my prompt and generated a list of ideas for me. But what happens if the information isn’t useful? From the response given, you can ask for edits or restart the prompt until you receive a useful response. This list then allows you to either match existing content to the ideas or indicate what resources may need to be created. Once all the resources have been created, you need captions for your posts. Again, AI can do this for you. By providing a prompt such as ‘write me a caption for a social post on LinkedIn using this link/content/resource and encourage the reader to sign up using this form’ you can copy the answer or make your edits, and attach it to the rest of the social media post.
Copywriting
Similarly, AI tools can also be used to optimise captions on social media posts, with many scheduling tools now featuring built-in AI tools. Take Hootsuite for example, it’s built-in OwlyWriter AI enables users to optimise, change the tone, or alter the length of a caption they have written. This feature is beneficial especially when multiple posts on the same piece of content need to be differentiated.
Another way that AI tools can be leveraged for copywriting is for emails. When building an email campaign, it can be difficult to come up with ideas for several emails at one time. By using an AI tool, Marketers can benefit from receiving a thought-out email flow, content ideas, call-to-action suggestions, and much more. Alternatively, if you have all the ideas and need to save time on composing the emails, put the ideas into your AI tool and watch it write the email for you (of course they need to be checked and edited but this can cut the copywriting time down significantly).
Data Analysis
Data analysis can be a lengthy task, with many different parts to consider. However, with the help of AI, data can be collected, stored, analysed, and organised from several sources at one time, doing all the hard work for you. Not only is it capable of all this, but it can also be advantageous in personalising journeys that customers will receive and predicting behaviours through analysing trends and patterns from past campaigns. This information is extremely valuable to marketers as it helps us to target their customers more personally, therefore increasing the chance that a customer will interact with the campaign.
Copilot
One specific AI tool that I am a big fan of is Microsoft Copilot. Its versatility lends itself to becoming very helpful for Marketers. As it’s integrated with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, Copilot can be utilised within the CRM system to create journeys. Instead of spending time building a journey, I can tell Copilot what I want my journey to look like and it will build it for me:
Copilot is also available to trial with automated prompts to help you explore its capabilities and learn how you could benefit from the tool.
Outside of CRMs, Copilot also helps to quickly answer questions by scouring the internet. With the chat screen available on every page, users can quickly find the answers they need without having to open new tabs or do the research for themselves.
Overall, AI has many uses in the world of Marketing, and it is a valuable tool that could allow us to become more efficient and superior in our roles.
