The Future of Enterprise and Generative AI: Part 3

Part 3 of 3: Implementing Generative AI in Marketing

Welcome to the third installment in our four-part series exploring generative AI! Missed our previous blogs? You can catch up here for an overview of generative AI, and here for how it affects your business. You should now have a general understanding of the generative AI landscape and its potential business applications. Next, we want to walk you through how you can apply this powerful tool to your marketing strategy.

After all, that’s why you’re reading a blog post by a digital marketing agency. The marketing game is undergoing a profound revolution. From crafting compelling content to reshaping SEO strategies and redefining client outreach, generative AI is leaving no stone unturned. The possibilities are endless.

Benefits of generative AI for marketers

In a BCG survey, 70% of CMOs reported their organizations have already used generative AI in some capacity. This technology has proven particularly influential in areas such as personalization, insight generation, and content creation, effectively streamlining processes and reducing both time and costs for businesses.

Generative AI can analyze data and identify consumer behavior patterns to aid marketers in creating more relevant content than ever before. It can suggest story beats and best practices based on a user’s content consumption habits. But its use can go beyond just content creation, as we get a glimpse in the practical ways that CMOs have been testing generative AI technologies.

Text-based content creation

From generating social media content, to writing blog posts, to drafting email campaigns, AI writing tools like Jasper, ChatGPT, or Copy.ai can quickly produce unique ideas for a first draft. Human marketers can then continue to readjust the prompt to alter the content and make sure it fits the brand’s vision. Additionally, generative AI can be used for different content-driven purposes like:

• Writing social media promotions, blog posts, and email marketing
• Producing scripts and directions for videos and advertisements
• Generating concise and engaging product descriptions

Aside from drafting something new, generative AI can also update existing content by providing insights and suggestions for improvement. Marketers can feed previously produced work into these AI platforms to learn the language of the writer and check for consistency, sentence structure, or grammatical errors.

It’s crucial to ensure human involvement throughout the process of AI-generated content creation. Chatbots can write well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can write well for the audience you’re catering to. Marketing professionals will need to monitor AI content for relevance, quality, and accuracy. You should see generative AI as a starting point, not as the final solution.

Graphics, images, and videos

Many generative AI models can create eye-catching visuals to enhance the storytelling of posts and make engaging presentations. Platforms like Midjourney and DALL.E 2 are popular AI image generators that produce a variety of materials in response to your prompts. Keep in mind that you get whatever you give, so if you feed low-quality prompts to these tools, you most likely will get subpar materials not worth your while.

Visuals generated from these tools can be implemented in marketing in many ways. Keep in mind, however, there are many legal issues surrounding AI-generated images and their commercial use currently being discussed. Although you can certainly create highly realistic mock-ups to use internally or as creative starting points, you might think twice before utilizing them for public presentations, social media, or other outbound marketing materials. Since these images are created with the help of algorithms and data, there are questions surrounding legal ownership, originality, and authenticity of these images. Generative AI video tools can help create marketing videos and product demo videos as well, although these tools are yet to be used as widely as text and image generators, and currently have the same legal concerns.

SEO and marketing automation

Not only can generative AI read through large amounts of data, but it can also directly provide summaries and recommendations based on its analysis. This ability is especially helpful in identifying consumer behavior patterns for narrowing down your SEO strategy.

Hyper-personalization can be achievable at scale with generative AI tailoring content to individual users’ preferences and behaviors. With AI generated customer segmentation, marketers can leverage AI-generated variations of the same content to implement in highly customized campaigns for companies or customers they are targeting, effectively improving the customer experience through better personalization, and leading to higher conversion rates.

Some examples of building SEO content with generative AI tools include discovering content topic ideas, conducting keyword research, writing relevant headers, drafting content structure, or grouping search intent. Human creativity cannot be replaced, however, and marketers should keep a close eye on these AI-generated results. Striking a good balance between automated output and creative human thought will be imperative for quality SEO campaigns that can drive results.

Seamless customer service

A major part of the marketing process is nurturing consumers through their customer journey. Excellent customer service requires lots of time and attention from sales reps and marketers. Generative AI can lighten the load in customer service and cut down on time working through repetitive tasks. Conversational AI models can quickly understand customer queries and respond to them faster than humans. They can be trained in existing company policies and best practices to provide customers with speedy responses to their specific issues. Utilized as the first point of contact, chatbots can save your reps time in working through easy-to-fix issues and let them spend more time developing and fostering meaningful client relationships.

Some examples of where generative AI can automate customer service tasks include: AI-integrated messaging apps offering 24/7 customer service; email automation providing faster responses to common queries and requests; self-service portals giving users customized recommendations and solutions depending on past behaviors and purchases; and multilingual capabilities and hyper-localization catering to a wider range of customers.

Challenges of generative AI in marketing

As revolutionary as generative AI is, the technology is not without flaws. For starters, any generative AI system is only as good as the data it is trained on. These models are trained from mountains of data across the Internet, which might include outdated content, misinformation, or human biases. It still involves human intervention to make sure potential biases are accounted for in the training data. Then there’s the privacy concern, as sensitive information — trade secrets, company practices, or customer information — can be included in either the training data or the input from users of generative AI platforms, which can then be disseminated throughout the Internet.

Marketers must work to ensure that user privacy and personal data are safely and responsibly handled through rigorous data protection procedures, obtaining the appropriate consent, and being transparent about data usage. The question of ethics in generative AI implementation extends to include the business itself. You must be mindful of being clear and honest about where generative AI is incorporated in the content generation pipeline, such as putting a disclaimer for auto-generated images or videos. Strong relationships with clients are built on trust, and users want to know whether they are interacting with a human or a computer pretending to be human.

Finally, generative AI might not always provide the most accurate and relevant content to best reflect your brand’s identity. It can provide very convincing responses, but to always provide an answer, its responses can also be “hallucinated”. Yes, it can produce highly targeted content at an incredible speed, but it might just be writing for a general audience, as it does not have the entire context of your brand, your consumers, and the history between the two. Human knowledge, creativity, and emotions are still central to the production of marketing campaigns and the relationship building with consumers. Marketers should aim to upskill to become “super editors” who can work effectively with AI tools in every step of the process — from prompt generation to content editing.

Refine your generative AI implementation with Adcetera

Still not sure of the most optimal way to incorporate generative AI into your marketing strategy? Contact us, and we would love to partner with you. We responsibly review and utilize these technologies to support specific client requests, and we are actively working on solutions to optimize generative AI usage in our unified, holistic approach to digital marketing. Get a glimpse of how we incorporate artificial intelligence, and see for yourself how we can bring your business measurable results.