- What is Generative AI in Marketing?
- Benefits of Generative AI in Marketing
- Key Use Cases of Generative AI in Marketing
- Implementing Generative AI in Marketing
Q: What Are Some Key Use Cases of Generative AI in Marketing?
A: Key use cases include content generation, visual and video content creation, customer service automation, and SEO and advertising optimization.
Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative AI has been all the buzz across industries, social media, and the internet at large.
People use it for everything, from writing blog posts and replying to emails to video creation, image generation, and writing poems for their better halves.
Across industries, the application of gen AI is more advanced, traversing very diverse use cases, such as gene remedy, game development, build applications, automated manufacturing processes, etc.
For small business owners, the applications range from content creation, AI chatbots, and virtual assistants to marketing automation and operations management.
In fact, there are so many applications of gen AI in small businesses that in a Forbes list of 20 fields that AI is revolutionizing, 5 of the functions were very much applicable to small businesses.
These functions include retail pricing and promotions, digital marketing, product development, outbound sales, and legal documentation.
In this article, the focus will be on generative AI in marketing.
As of 2024, the market for AI in digital marketing was estimated at $35.99 billion; it’s set to exceed $100 billion by 2028.
When you take a quick look at how generative AI has permeated the digital marketing landscape, you’ll see why those numbers are attainable.
Currently, there are over 300 mainstream AI tools for small businesses, and there are probably a lot more in development or in the shadows.
Many of these tools are designed to enhance marketing automation and drive AI marketing strategies. However, the ubiquity of AI tools can confuse business owners and marketing professionals who want to leverage AI to enhance marketing innovation and streamline their marketing strategies.
This article brings clarity to generative AI in marketing, addressing the benefits of generative AI, the key use cases in marketing, and how to implement it to ensure efficiency and productivity.
Save Big! Virtual Office Business Address
Type your email address in the form below and we’ll send you a Promo Code
Use the Promo Code at checkout to Save at least $100 on your Virtual Office
What is Generative AI in Marketing?
Generative AI in digital marketing refers to the use of advanced algorithms and machine learning models to create content (including images, texts, audio, videos, simulations), strategies, and solutions that mimic human creativity.
When you think of gen AI in marketing automation and other processes, think data.
Gen AI can analyze large amounts of data, including market trends, customers’ historical data, company data, and demographic information, to identify/predict and act on best-fit strategies for:
- Creating hyper-personalized content that resonates with each user based on their interactions with products, behaviors, backgrounds, and preferences.
- Driving customer engagement through AI chatbots, virtual assistants, and other AI-driven marketing tools that facilitate personalized customer support across multiple channels.
- Automating campaign management across various marketing tasks, including competitive research, website traffic analysis, customer segmentation, and more.
Collecting vast amounts of data is the first step to creating generative AI for marketing innovations. AI experts create AI algorithms, which are then trained on the data, enabling these algorithms to recognize patterns and respond with appropriate output. It is upon this guiding principle that various gen AI marketing tools are developed.
In your hands, the ability of gen AI models to learn and recreate enables you to train AI tools to create content with your brand voice simply by feeding it samples of your previous content.
Benefits of Generative AI
For as many applications of gen AI in marketing you can think of, there are equal numbers of gen AI benefits to match.
These benefits can be summarized across four themes:
- Enhanced creativity
- Personalization
- Efficiency and scalability
- Data-driven insights
Personalization
When it comes to gen AI marketing strategies, one of the terms you’re most likely to come across a few times is “hyper-personalization.”
Gen AI isn’t just personalizing marketing messaging and interactions; it’s doing it to a point that many would consider mind-blowing and others would consider scary.
Gen AI tools can engage in hyper-personalized interactions with users across every step of their customer journey, from acquisition to eventual purchase (and repeat purchases).
They assess and learn from users’ data, including contextual and behavioral data, to develop personalized recommendations, offers, messages, and experiences for each user. This approach helps marketers establish seamless engagement with each user, capitalizing on their unique needs to drive sales.
In the context of marketing personalization, the many benefits include:
- Enhanced customer experience: Gen AI tools understand customers’ preferences in real time, even as they change. This ensures that customers always receive offers and content that resonate with unique needs.
- Scalability: It doesn’t matter that you have 100 or 1,000,000 customers; AI can handle vast amounts of data at scale, ensuring that every one of them receives personalized content.
- Increase in ROI: Working at scale with personalized marketing strategies translates to higher conversion rates, which leads to increased ROI.
Netflix, Amazon, Google, and Spotify are some companies that maximize AI personalization in marketing.
Enhanced Creativity
Generative AI can augment human creativity by generating innovative ideas and concepts for marketing campaigns.
From tasks as simple as brainstorming appropriate email headers that convert to complex tasks like A/B testing campaign strategies, gen AI is helping marketers find more creative ways to promote products and services.
In essence, marketing professionals are using gen AI marketing tools to generate ideas, design concepts, and implement strategies more efficiently.
You can see the effects of this benefit across various marketing activities, including:
- Creating marketing content: Businesses and marketers employ AI-driven content creation tools to produce text, image, audio, and video marketing materials at scale in a fraction of the time it would ordinarily take to create these materials individually.
- Creating responsive websites: From color schemes and layout to imagery, AI is helping businesses create captivating websites and landing pages for their products.
By using gen AI to test the extent of creativity, more businesses and marketers are now pushing out more compelling campaigns that don’t merely rely on ad placements and targeting to attract customers.
Efficiency and Scalability
Generative AI can significantly improve every aspect of marketing automation, allowing marketers to scale their efforts without significantly increasing costs.
For instance, gen AI can automatically set up email formats and implement customer segmentation faster and more efficiently than humans.
Freed time creates more room and energy for marketers to explore and exploit complex campaign strategies and define easier pathways to execution.
Basically, with generative AI in marketing teams, team members will spend less time on repetitive and mundane tasks and more on creative thinking, marketing innovation, collaborations, and problem-solving.
As a result, the entire team can do more at a larger scale, boosting overall efficiency, scalability, and productivity.
Data-driven Insights
As we’ve mentioned, generative AI is all about data, both in training and in outputs.
In this context, the data-driven basis of gen AI models stands as one of the most impressive benefits.
The success of many marketing strategies depends on marketers’ ability to make sense of market, industry, and consumer data.
In today’s world of big data, businesses and marketing are burdened with more data than ever before. Sometimes, they don’t know what to do with it or how to even start analyzing them.
Forward-thinking teams leverage the analytical and predictive capabilities of gen AI to collect and analyze large datasets, extracting valuable insights and recommendations that help marketers make informed decisions.
These data-driven insights inform AI marketing strategies that bestow businesses and marketing teams with a formidable competitive edge over competitors.
Key Use Cases of Generative AI in Marketing
Below are some use cases that can help you fully access the benefits of generative AI marketing strategies.
Text-based Content Generation
Generative AI can create various types of text-based content, including blog posts, email newsletters, and social media updates.
Thanks to various AI tools, you don’t have to be the best copywriter to create copies that sell.
Marketers are using tools like HubSpot’s content writer, ChatGPT, SocialBee, Hypotenuse.AI, and Anyword to generate different types of optimized content for their website, social media, and email campaigns.
Most of these tools empower your content marketing strategies with templates and prompts that assess your brand tone, target audience preferences, keywords, and expectations during content generation. This ensures that your content hardly misses the mark.
Visual and Video Content
You have probably come across some images and videos that required a second look before you realized that they were AI-generated. Such visual and video content are rife in the entertainment industry, but marketers are getting in on the action, too.
Marketing professionals and small businesses use generative AI tools like Runway and DALL-E to create stunning visual and video content tailored to specific marketing needs.
The good thing about these AI tools is that you don’t have to be an expert before using them to generate images and videos.
Many businesses like yours are using DALL-E alongside other AI tools like Copy.ai to generate visual content for their blogs and social media. This enhances their creativity and workflow, speeding up their content creation process while allowing them to try out different visual styles effortlessly.
You can start small with these tools; experiment over and over until you get it right.
SEO and Advertising
Marketing professionals use generative AI to optimize their SEO strategies and create targeted advertising campaigns to reach specific audiences.
Suppose you have virtual office spaces in different locations and need to align your advertising strategies with the demands of each location.
You can leverage generative AI machine learning in marketing to identify phrases and keywords that can improve your search engine rankings in each location, boosting your organic traffic and brand visibility in each location effortlessly.
This contrasts with using a generic advertising campaign to reach your target audience in your different locations, which is a recipe for marketing failure.
With generative AI in marketing, it’s about the present as much as the future. With AI-driven predictive SEO, you can further enrich your SEO campaigns and make them more agile and dynamic in the face of undesirable market shifts, allowing your advertising efforts to stay relevant long-term.
Customer Service
If you’ve been in the marketing space for a while, you’d know that to run a campaign successfully, you have to set up a customer support system to attend to the droves of customer inquiries and interactions that would come with it.
For those who are unprepared, the inflow could be overwhelming. Thankfully, gen AI is helping businesses and marketers cope with ease.
There are many applications of generative AI in customer service, including AI chatbots and virtual assistants, which provide personalized support and assistance to customers in real time.
These tools can handle basic customer inquiries instantly, helping improve response times and customer satisfaction. Some businesses and marketing teams program their AI chatbots and virtual assistants to escalate complex cases to human agents, making customer service delivery more efficient and productive.
Other applications of AI in marketing and customer service include:
- Sentiment analysis: Gen AI algorithms can analyze customer sentiments and feedback in real time to help address concerns and ensure customer satisfaction.
- Multi-language customer support: Some AI customer support tools backed by translation services can support multiple languages, enabling businesses to break language barriers and extend their reach.
- Personalized marketing with AI: At the intersection of marketing and customer service, there are AI algorithms that adapt marketing content and recommendations to help customers find desired products and services quickly.
- Training simulations: Businesses use gen AI to simulate real-life scenarios common with target customers, providing immersive training experiences for customer support agents.
Other applications in customer service include automated surveys, appointment scheduling, fraud detection, automated billing support, and automated email responses.
Implementing Generative AI in Digital Marketing
What you give is what you get.
To ensure the best, or at least better, outcomes with your AI marketing strategies, you must ensure that you have enabling measures in place for successful implementation.
We have listed some useful pointers below to help with your implementation process.
Choosing the Right Tools
First things first, you must identify and define your business needs and marketing goals before setting out to choose the appropriate AI digital marketing tool.
Do you need a tool for automated content generation, marketing innovation, or personalized marketing with AI?
Note that some tools, though sharing similar functions with others in the same category, might not be the best fit for what you want to achieve.
For instance, HubSpot’s content writer, ChatGPT, SocialBee, Hypotenuse.AI, and Anyword can all be described as AI writing assistants for marketing professionals. However, where SocialBee is more appropriate for creating short social media posts, HubSpot’s content writer is where to look if you want to create persuasive blog posts.
Therefore, it is essential to first determine what you need AI tools for before you start your search.
While on the search, you should assess the potential tools on the merits of their:
- Compatibility: Is it compatible with existing systems in your marketing department and the business as a whole?
- Scalability: As your marketing needs grow, can the tools grow alongside to accommodate those needs?
- Interface: Go for easy-to-use tools with a user-friendly interface. This will aid quick adoption within your marketing team and make it easier for your target audience to interact with various touchpoints.
- Reputation: What are users saying about their performance, efficiency, and accuracy? Can you rely on the tools for accurate or nearly accurate outcomes? Do the developers or providers offer adequate support?
- Compliance with data security policies and regulations: The last thing you want to do is go for a tool that is highly prone to security breaches. Data security is one of the biggest concerns of AI explosion, and 86% of American consumers are more concerned about data security and privacy than the state of the economy in the U.S., according to Forbes.
These considerations will help you make an informed choice, ensuring you pick a tool that boosts your marketing productivity and effectiveness.
Integration with Existing Systems
One cannot overemphasize the importance of integrating AI tools with current marketing platforms and technologies.
For starters, it saves you the cost of purchasing new tools and systems that are compatible with it.
Also, integration ensures integrity, seamlessness, and consistency in your marketing workflow and strategy execution.
Thankfully, most developers and providers of AI in digital marketing recognize the importance of compatibility and integration with existing marketing systems.
Hence, it’s now easier to find AI tools that are compatible with various marketing channels, platforms, and technologies in the market—but not all.
Therefore, you should take the time to cross-check and confirm that the tool you are going for is integrable across your platforms and technologies. It’s often best to do trial runs before making a full commitment.
Training and Support
Provide training and ongoing support for marketing teams to ensure the effective use of generative AI tools.
Things to consider during training include:
- Adoption and accessibility: Although generative AI is quite the trend now and is easy to sell, it is still your responsibility as a business owner or marketing leader to encourage team members to use given AI tools for certain marketing tasks. This is also where generative AI tools with friendly interfaces come into play; ease of use means that team members can quickly get the hang of it and use it to streamline their tasks.
- Data protection: Call in experts to train your team on the best practices for using AI tools safely, as well as how to detect malicious activities or elements in AI systems.
Ongoing support should be the watchword, both from the provider’s end and your end. Ensure that regular updates are implemented and that team members are free to approach you or a designated expert whenever they encounter issues with the tool.
Measuring Success
Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to help you track the effectiveness of generative AI in marketing campaigns:
Assessing your AI campaign strategies against your marketing goals can help you surface more useful metrics for measuring success.
If the outcomes are not impressive, adjust your strategies or use other AI tools.
Wrapping Up: Generative AI
AI has proven to be an effective tool for enhancing small business marketing campaigns.
It has created opportunities for marketing teams to continually refine their strategies and enjoy the benefits of enhanced creativity, hyper-personalization, data-driven insights, and overall marketing efficiency, productivity, and scalability.
From customer service and SEO optimization to visual, text-based, and video content generation, there are many use cases for generative AI in marketing that can guarantee you the benefits of generative AI.
Further Reading:
- Technologies Powering Virtual Office Spaces
- Empowering Independence: A Guide for the Modern Independent Business Owner
- Maximizing Customer Value: A Guide to Customer Retention Analysis
- Green Marketing Definition: What It Is and How It Works
However, this is only possible when you have appropriate measures in place for implementing generative AI in marketing. Choose AI tools that are compatible with your existing systems, train your team on the best practices, and monitor and evaluate the tools continually across various KPIs to measure success.
Also, ensure that you have the necessary setups in place to enhance overall marketing success. If cost considerations are hindering you from employing receptionists to handle customers’ calls around the clock, then it’s time to look at hiring a live receptionist for as low as $1,500 per year!
Contact us now to learn more about Alliance Virtual Offices’ live receptionist and virtual office services and how they can complement your campaigns for assured success.
