How to Apply AI Tools to Your Marketing Program
10 MIN READ
Has your company embraced AI tools yet? More specifically, has your marketing department?
From ChatGPT to Midjourney to Jasper and every tool in between, there are quite literally countless ways brands and companies are beginning to take advantage of AI. And that infinite list just keeps growing as us marketers get better at harnessing the power of AI.
Disruption may be scary, but rest assured, AI can be the dominant factor in increasing efficiency within your team, both in its existing processes and its output. Just as a better email marketing service helps you manage your newsletter program, AI will help to improve your marketing strategy with end-to-end support.
Everything will still need a human connection (we still “dial 0” when contacting customer support), as it is your overarching strategy, brand stewardship, and expertise on the user experience side that is the beating heart of your marketing success.
Our hot take in case this is a TL;DR situation for you: For many brands, AI will be invaluable in increasing efficiency and allowing marketing teams to do more with less. It is the death knell of mediocracy. T-shaped or V-shaped marketers who can look at the bigger picture and tie strategic elements together will win the day.
Perfecting the Art of the AI Prompt
By now you likely know that AI tools are only as good as the prompts you put into them and the bot training you provide. Since the launch of ChatGPT, experts across social media have been eager to “crack the code” of generating the most effective prompts and that knowledge is now (albeit) slowly being disseminated to brands and their marketing arms.
Needless to say, writing fruitful prompts is no easy feat and the amount of detail you need to add varies depending on the type of tool you’re using and the output you want. It takes vision, creativity, skill, and a very solid understanding of what exactly you’re trying to achieve. Utilize prompt templates and the examples in the next section to help build your brand’s AI prompt database rather than trying to reinvent the wheel every time you need to ask an AI tool to produce something.
Resources
We mentioned it earlier, but the experts are in the midst of doing their thing and providing us eager beavers with all of the information and tactics required to make the most of language processing tools. Any simple Google search will yield plenty of resources and effective prompt templates but here are a couple that we found to be especially helpful.
Leveraging This Iteration of AI
We’re not the first to tell you, and we won’t be the last: AI tools cannot produce a finished product. Even still, as you can see from the prompt examples below, the variety of ways in which AI tools can be used is endless.
That of course includes its ability to make your brand’s marketing program more impactful and efficient. To the former point, AI bots can provide you the raw data to inject into almost any of your marketing levels. In other words, AI is capable of supplying the first-level data needed to execute your marketing strategy.
Content Marketing
When it comes to content marketing, you’re better able to develop article outlines, topic lists, and frequently asked questions. And then…the hard work begins. Everything will still need to be built out and written in your brand’s unique tone of voice, providing a messaging hierarchy that is impactful enough to foster brand loyalty and ultimately convert them. In other words, this AI-generated content will need the strategic touch that only T-shaped marketers can provide.
Content Topics Prompt Example
“Act as a market research expert that speaks and writes fluent English. sustainability, women over 30 are the target audience, top keywords, and a topic for the questions. You will then generate the top 10 questions related to that keyword, for that target audience. Write it all in English.”
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO projects benefit greatly from AI efficiency. Use AI to write the first draft for:
Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and Alternate Text for Imagery
Scheme Markup for Content
Topic FAQs and Sub-heads
Keyword Research
If you need to produce SEO content at scale, you can utilize the paid version of ChatGPT-4. Just don’t forget to narrow down the results to highly relevant keywords, and polish accordingly.
HTML Coding
Are your developers spending too much time writing basic code? Use AI to figure out if a piece of code is still needed! Ask AI to tell you in plain English what the code is, what it does, and if it’s still relevant. Tools like CoPilot can help with this and can also help developers write baseline code so more time is spent on business logic.
Paid Advertising + Analytics
Experiment with tying AI into Google Analytics and into your paid media campaigns. Use cases around analyzing this type of data and trends are still in their infancy but these tools can provide helpful recommendations. We are still a little ways off from AI completely understanding the nuances of analytics (and, as a result, how it can translate to more effective advertising campaigns), but you can still get ahead of the learning curve.
Quick side note here. As marketers, we’ve all had to make our peace with Excel at one point or another—especially when it comes to reporting. AI tools can now act as an Excel spreadsheet or simply save you countless minutes writing macros.
AI-Generated Designs
For creative works, consider AI as a tool for ideation and brainstorming. The resulting website suggestion is a starting point. Yes, alignments will be off, copy will not be usable, sections will be missing. But the goal is not to use this design as the final product. Instead, these images can help us determine the overall feel for the project or provide a new perspective on how images should be placed on the page. Your designer can use elements of AI-generated images paired with 3D-renderings of actual products to produce something completely new and different. Something that will compel consumers and, hopefully, drive action.
Results for the Image Prompt Example via BlueWillow.ai
Image Prompt Example
“A tired, sleek looking business man that is seemingly put together to everyone else, yet he is experiencing life events that are troublesome and disturbing. Include themes of loneliness as well as feelings of carrying a heavy burden. 4k, ultra hd, surreal, ultra realistic.”
Color Scheme Prompt Example
“A color palette for a lifestyle brand with purples and greens.”
Website Creation Prompt
“Beautiful website for home essentials, ui, ux, ui/ux, green blue orange.”
AI & Ethical Concerns
While AI has numerous benefits, there are two extremely important pitfalls that need to be considered: where is the AI tool getting its information and what potential for bias does it have?
Take design tools for example. Aside from the issue of AI art often making funhouse versions of the intended prompt, we don’t recommend these designs as a finished product as these tools scrape the internet looking for art to mix together into a new finished product. In theory, this might sound fine, but the tool may really just be stealing work from the artists who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into building their skills and executing exceptional paintings, photography, and more. Sometimes the theft is so blatant that you can see an artist’s watermark in the corner.
As a values-driven brand, you don’t want to build a reputation for stealing the work of anyone, even if it was unintentional and through an AI tool. Similar questionable practices are prevalent in other types of AI tools as well (we’ve heard stories of AI ripping social copy from a competitor’s bio…awkward), so be vigilant and do your research.
In addition to where this data is coming from, it’s critical to think about the biases it contains. Just because the tool doesn’t inherently have a prejudiced lens to offer you information as a human would, that doesn’t mean that the information it gathers is free from bias. We all live in a system of oppression that thrives off of racism, sexism, ableism, and so many other forms of discrimination. Because of this, the information we have access to also has inherent biases that may be overlooked. Dr. Hadas Kotek, a Linguist working at Apple, recently shared a tweet from an experiment she ran on ChatGPT that brought to light the inherent bias of the tool. Through Dr. Kotek’s test, she found that ChatGPT relied on gender stereotypes around doctors and nurses—so much that the tool would indicate a nurse being a “he” was a mistake or error.
When using AI to collect data, it’s important to fact check this information against reliable resources to ensure what info the tool provides reflects multiple demographics. Be diligent in identifying stereotypes and other biases and share that information with others for widespread awareness of these AI pitfalls.
AI Policy
AI policy is by no means fully formed. Please, please, keep this in mind when working with the tools. Lean into the first-level data perspective, don’t try to copyright AI-generated images, and (for goodness sake) refrain from giving tools confidential data.
We recommend developing your own company policies around AI. By educating your team on the possibilities and then building these tools into your workflows, AI will be baked into the team's daily processes. This ranges from G-Suite to file storage—the latter being less sexy, but it can slow down a team significantly. Simply train your AI bot on your file storage and team members can prompt a chatbot to help them identify and find files.
AI Tools for Your Consideration
Below are some of the AI tools currently available to marketers. While many of these tools offer a paid subscription for a tool with more advanced features, each of these includes a free, basic level membership or a free trial.
AIPRM for ChatGPT: This Google chrome extension adds a list of curated prompt templates for SEO, SaaS and more to ChatGPT.
CoPilot: GitHub Copilot turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions.
Midjourney: Midjourney generates images from natural language descriptions.
Notion AI: A writing assistant that can help you write, brainstorm, edit, summarize, and more.
Adobe Firefly: A family of creative generative AI models coming to Adobe products.
Conclusion
We’re not going to say that AI makes marketing “easier”—that would be inconsiderate to the previous efforts of brands dedicated to reaching their ideal audience by leaning into their values for a more personalized consumer experience. What AI and the current iteration of tools will do is help you build a department that uses data even more creatively and effectively.
And if you’re not sure how best to integrate these tools or if you’re in need of additional assistance in your lifestyle brand’s marketing services, we’re always available to lend a hand. As an award-winning digital marketing agency, we are dedicated to ensuring that you’re pulling the right levers to attract the right audience. Contact us today.
