According to OpenAI's CEO, "[AI will do] 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today." Ouch! For marketers and creatives who are questioning whether AI will replace their job or not, don't let this statement scare you.
Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool, and although it can become fully autonomous someday, it can't replicate every characteristic of a human. In this blog, we share how marketing professionals can use AI to their advantage and why it's important to have primed technical skills going forward.
Helpful to Marketers: Using AI in tandem with other tools
AI is quickly becoming a regular aspect of a marketer's strategy. As of 2024, artificial intelligence is easily accessible to anyone—even free-lance marketers who might not have the largest tech stack at hand.
From writing short and long form copy to generating images and summarizing client meetings, AI tools can help marketers significantly reduce time spent on daily tasks:
- Claude by Anthropic: This helpful AI bot can perform quick research on any topic, generate blog outlines, summarize transcripts, write social captions, recommend SEO strategies, and a lot more—all while practicing safe data usage.
- Zoom AI Companion: Marketers want to hear directly from customers. For teams using Zoom, meetings with clients can be intelligently transcribed, summarized, and scored based on responses. If you're using a CRM, these insights can be attached to a customer account for easy access in the future.
- HubSpot AI: Marketers crave efficiency to move quickly. With HubSpot's AI capabilities combined with tools like OpenAI, content for your website and beyond can be spun up in half the time it used to take. Insights from both your CRM and CMS can be quickly analyzed by AI, providing you with key themes to further personalize your marketing efforts.
- Canva AI: Every marketer's best friend, Canva, continues to put out tons of AI features including image generation, tools for video-editing, and much more at a low cost compared to other design apps.
- Grammarly: Quality and accuracy is extremely important when engaging with your audience. Grammarly ensures blogs, emails, and web copy maintain a polished, on-brand voice while correcting grammar and spelling errors. Other AI tools such as ChatGPT can draft the initial copy, which Grammarly then perfects. This powerful combination allows rapid content production without sacrificing quality.
- Salesforce AI: Connecting AI insights to your CRM drives targeted campaigns. By integrating AI tools with Salesforce, marketers gain a unified customer view. AI-analyzed data like call transcripts can be automatically synced to contact records. This rich data allows Salesforce's AI to surface relevant content and predict optimal times for engagement. Marketers can rapidly create personalized journeys using those AI-generated assets as well.
Another way to use AI to gain insights is by asking it to deploy a survey for research purposes. You can then feed that data back into AI and ask it to analyze customer data to identify trends and patterns. A variety of industries have started to use AI to be more efficient and consumer observant.
This allows marketers to better understand their target audiences and personalize messaging and offers. AI tools can also track engagement across channels to optimize marketing spend and impact.
Hurting Marketers: AI, it’s another thing to keep up with
Marketers are busy busy busy, but be prepared to add AI as another thing to keep up with. AI tools and techniques are constantly changing and evolving, making things much more confusing.
Marketers may feel pressure to jump on every AI trend without proper testing or training. But, blindly adopting new strategies isn't always the answer. Thoughtfully evaluating AI solutions and their impact takes time.
Here are a few ways marketers can learn more about AI and stay up-to-date:
- HubSpot's Monthly AI Topic Blogs
- MIT Technology Review
- Salesforce's AI Blogs and Articles
- Microsoft's AI Weekly News
- OpenAI's Updates and Changes
Helpful to Marketers: Original content is king
With AI generated pictures and content on the rise, many marketers think, what does this mean for us? While AI tools are increasingly utilized for content creation, original human-created content is still essential for successful marketing. Unique, high-quality and engaging content (i.e. webinars, podcasts, how-to videos, etc.) is what builds brand affinity and drives business growth.
Trends and consumer interests are rapidly changing. The truth is, AI platforms like ChatGPT can’t keep up. While these AI platforms can spit out content in seconds, marketers understand and conduct more thorough research on niche consumer trends.
AI-generated content might be passable at surface level, but it lacks originality and the ability to spark true excitement with an audience. Another level to this is brand audience. Marketers truly understand their brand’s audience and can create content that is directed and more curated.
Sometimes, content volume matters less than quality that demonstrates original thinking. Without originality, content most often will not drive meaningful engagement.
Cautionary tales about using AI-generated content for SEO
While it can be tempting to just use these AI platforms to write ten blogs and articles in a day, it's important to know the consequences of using AI in that way. An important thing to note is that if AI is not properly trained to know your audience, your tone of voice, and other aspects of your business, AI-generated copy can sound inaccurate to what you really stand for.
Another thing to consider is the topic of SEO and possibly being down ranked if you are creating and deploying content unusually. Search engines like Google are adept at identifying low-quality, spammy content. Pages glutted with AI-generated text that lack substance often get penalized in rankings. For best SEO practices, reference Google's guidance on using AI-generated content.
While it can be extremely tempting to create and publish blogs written by AI to save time, be cautious about the content itself and the consequences associated with it. Prioritizing relevance, quality and originality is essential for sustainable search visibility and audience trust.
Key Takeaways
A few reassuring notes for marketers on AI: this technology doesn't do its best without human intervention. While AI tools can expedite drafting and research, true creativity remains beyond its reach.
The human touch—original ideas, brand storytelling, team collaboration—is what sets great marketing apart. AI should be used as an assistant rather than a replacement. If used thoughtfully, it enables faster insights from data and frees up time for strategy and innovation.
