EMBiz: How Marketing Agencies Use AI

How Marketing Agencies Use AI

Cody H. Owens

Hi, Cody here, content director at Elevate my brand, and I want to talk to you about how marketers are using AI right now. 

Common Uses

First of all, I want to tell you about some of the common use cases for AI in marketing. There's a grand list of ways that you can use AI, but the most common right now are analyzing large data sets that require a lot of time and attention. 

Two is predicting trends. So you can use AI to say what's happening now, what's most likely to happen in the future, so you can plan your campaigns accordingly. 

Three, is communicating with your customers. Lots of brands are using AI chatbots in order to answer common questions and interface with their customers. 

Four, is optimizing your organization and your workflow. So this is the stuff that's behind the scenes, so that you can automate and make sure that all of your systems are speaking to one another, so nothing falls through the cracks.

And the last one is, of course, generating that creative output. This is generative AI and that's both on the image side and on the copy side. 

And that's what a lot of our clients are using that we're seeing a lot of people, a lot of small businesses in particular using right now. So that's the most common, but all of those are use cases in marketing, whether you're an agency or an in-house team or an individual. 

AI in Marketing

So, a couple of notes about using AI in marketing right now. One is about your process. You do need to make sure that when you're using AI you have an extra and added layer of quality assurance because AI is smart, but it still makes mistakes, just like we do. So, in your, regular workflow, you may rely on your team. You've been working with your team for a long time. You trust them to have proofread their content, etc. But there's actually an added layer because sometimes AI has what's called hallucinations, in which case it gets things wrong. Sometimes it'll even make up a quote and attribute it to someone that has never said that. So you have to have an added layer of quality assurance and ensure you are fact-checking everything. So it does add that bit of time, but the amount of time it takes off of the actual content creation still makes it worth it. So in your AI process and marketing, make sure you're having that extra quality assurance. 

Then, on the creative side, I want to caution you against using AI for creative output and then just using it as is. In addition to the creative or the process part of quality assurance and fact-checking, you also want to make sure that you're not using AI just for the final output all of the time. For small businesses, you're gonna want to use this because it's a lifesaver in terms of content creation, graphic design, etc. But, you do want to use AI for creative inspiration more so than the final output. if you have an idea, give it to the AI generator, have it come up with some ideas, and then maybe that'll be what you need to spawn the idea that you can create yourself. Whatever platform you have, or to create copy and just give you ideas for an outline, right? So make sure that you're using it primarily for inspiration and then if you are using it for creative output, that you're doing that added layer of quality assurance. So, all that being said, our top three use cases for AI and marketing are one, that generative creative output for inspiration, and some of those like more basic things like if you're going to do like an abstract background or something like that, or some very basic social media captions, then that's totally fine. And that's used probably most often what we see with our clients and even internally. 

The second use case is going to be turning data into insights. There is a plethora of platforms and software out there that is going to help you turn these large data sets into insights. It can take a really long time as a human to be able to look through and sift through and find those connections between all the little juicy tidbits in your data, whereas is going to be able to do that for you very quickly and at scale. 

And then the third and final common use case we see is optimizing your customer pipelines. And that's what I was talking about earlier with either organizing, using things like Zapier or other platforms, to leverage AI to make sure all of your pieces are speaking to one another, but also literally speaking to your customer by Leveraging them for those chatbots, they're going to answer those common questions after you put in some input, it analyzes it and can actually have real conversations with your customers.

So those are the top three use cases we see for AI right now, and generally how we see our clients and customers and those across industries using AI in their marketing efforts.