Streamline Your Workflow With AI Marketing Tools
Streamline Your Workflow With AI Marketing Tools
In 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) — at least to the general public — was the stuff of movies and tech company YouTube videos.
Now, in 2023, if you know someone who hasn't heard of ChatGPT, you may want to check in on them more often — AI is the loudest buzzword in recent history. Organizations are rushing to discover how to apply this tech across teams and departments, including marketing. Can marketing teams use AI? And if so, how?
We'll explain AI marketing below: what it is, how to use it, its benefits, and drawbacks. We'll even show you some companies using AI in their marketing arsenals and how it's working out.
Table of Contents
What is AI marketing?
When marketing teams use artificial intelligence (AI) to obtain customer insights for better content and campaign production it's known as AI marketing. Each asset is guided by AI, optimized and personalized to each customer. AI marketing can take the form of chatbots, content generation, or other types of more targeted advertising.
Using AI in marketing involves data collection in which the AI marketing tool learns how each customer behaves. The tool analyzes the information for alignment with your business goals.
Photo by J. Cameron
Marketing teams use all sorts of AI marketing tools to design automated personalized customer outreach, but AI marketing solutions offer several other important uses, such as:
- SEO
- Analyzing data
- Data management
- Buying media
- Generating content
- Personalizing outreach
For instance, certain customer actions while on your website or social channels can trigger automatic, hyper-personalized messaging in the moment and then track customer behavior afterward.
What are AI marketing tools?
AI marketing solutions can be software programs or online platforms that use artificial intelligence to automate decision-making. Each decision is based on data collected, analyzed, and interpreted according to current trends in the broader market. AI marketing tools aim to anticipate a customer's next move.
Maybe the greatest thing about AI marketing tools is that everything happens in real time and none of these triggers require human intervention.
If you're already embracing the future of content marketing, consider a free, 30-day demo of Scripted Platform
Types of AI marketing tools
Marketing in 2023 and beyond is about data — yours, your competitors, trends in the market, customer chatter in social channels, and more. AI can source, analyze, and act on this data in seconds, so you're freed up to focus on other aspects of your company.
Many of today's businesses have been using AI in some manner for several years now. It's only due to the meteoric rise in popularity of such tools as ChatGPT that the technology has been widely recognized in the mainstream.
Some strategies marketing teams use AI for include content, product, email marketing, and advertising methods.
The premise of AI is to streamline our work processes—not to entirely replace us. No AI will ever be able to replicate a human touch. Our input, editing skills, and fact-checking will always be required.
Think about it.
AI-powered sentiment analysis and other techniques can:
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Help you bolster positive information and rectify critical reviews.
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Offer insight into your competitors' campaigns and keep you updated on rival tactics.
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Provide improved targeting, which means improved ROI.
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Help you keep pace with consumers' increasing demands for content.
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Take care of all your SEO research so you can craft compelling copy.
You need multiple AI marketing tools for all these functions, though... right?
Wrong.
Scripted AI tools + Scripted SMEs = An all-in-one solution
Nowhere else can you find everything you need for your content marketing strategy in one place. With Scripted's new suite of AI-powered content marketing tools and our human Subject Matter Experts, you have everything you need to create, track, analyze, and measure your content across platforms.
Some of Scripted's new AI-powered features include:
- Scripted Scripted Copilot
- Scripted Smart Content Brief
- Scripted SmartMatch Technology
- Scripted Research Bot
Pros & cons of using AI marketing tools
Like any advancements, AI-powered marketing tools have pros and cons. These advantages and drawbacks might look different for different businesses or applications.
Benefits of using AI marketing tools
AI marketing tools are:
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Efficient: An AI marketing tool has the processing power to view, sort, and analyze massive amounts of data in mere seconds.
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Accurate: The efficient analysis provides decision-makers with reliable insights and stunning accuracy related to how customers behave, what customers prefer, and current trends among consumers and the overall market.
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Personalized: Hyper-personalized campaigns and outreach specifically designed to target individuals rather than wide swaths of demographics improve customer experience, boosting your bottom line.
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Cost-Effective: Many mundane tasks marketing departments perform can be automated with AI marketing tools, freeing up marketing professionals to put their time and budget to better use and saving the company money on labor.
Other related advantages of AI marketing tools include the following:
- Increased return on investment.
- Enhanced, superior customer relationships.
- Improved marketing decisions.
Sure, AI marketing tools can improve your business from top to bottom…
Image credit: J. Cameron
…but that doesn't mean these tools are perfect.
These tools must be handled with care. In fact, AI tools are basically useless without your input.
Drawbacks of AI marketing tools
Some of the disadvantages of using AI tools for marketing include:
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Initial financial outlay: Implementing AI solutions or investing in multiple monthly tool subscriptions can be pretty pricey—especially for small business owners.
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Security concerns: One of AI's greatest selling points is its ability to collect and analyze more data than a whole team of data experts in mere seconds. This is one of its most significant disadvantages, too:
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Around the world—from California to the European Union—governments are becoming stricter about the types of information businesses can collect about their customers and how businesses use and store the data. With the addition of AI to many companies' tech stacks, data collection, storage, and analysis take on a whole new meaning and raise serious data security and privacy concerns.
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That human "X" factor is missing: AI is smart, logical, and analytical. It can offer credible insights about the direction of your business or the likely outcome of a marketing campaign. But it's not human, and it can't connect emotionally with consumers:
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Marketing is all about creating an atmosphere, stoking the fires of old memories, creating new memories, and eliciting an emotional response from consumers. FOMO (fear of missing out) is real; an AI program just can't generate a genuine emotional tug like a human can.
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Other drawbacks of AI in your marketing include:
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A drastic drop in content quality. AI should not be relied on to write entire blog posts without editing or fact-checking the information in the resulting content.
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Can't quantify certain KPIs. AI can track just about anything for evaluation, but the customer experience, expanding brand awareness, or fostering a solid business reputation — those are KPIs that require human interaction and analysis.
Examples of successful AI marketing campaigns
So, we've covered everything AI can do for marketing teams and its limitations. Sounds great, you think. But you want to know—how does it work in real time? What does it look like in practice?"
Well, these two companies are household names in their respective industries.
Take a look at how these businesses employ AI marketing in their campaigns.
Company: Netflix
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AI marketing use: Tailored artwork
- AI marketing goal: Increase conversions
As all marketing teams know, the "right time, right person" mantra means nothing if you deliver the wrong message. So, Netflix turned to AI marketing tools to tailor messaging specific to every viewer.
Around the world, viewers watch something on Netflix for an average of more than three hours per day (around 3.2). The streaming company's subscribers topped 222 million in Q1 2022.
*Crunches the numbers...*
Before revealing this equation's astronomical answer, consider this:
If you had to, could you keep tabs on just one of your customers for three hours on any given day? Really think about that — logging, categorizing, storing, and analyzing every single action that customer takes, every move that customer makes...
Before we break into song, let's get back to the Netflix math:
222 million subscribers x ~3.2 hours of daily viewing per subscriber
=
An average of 710.4 million hours of content streamed every 24 hours
If a human team of data analysts was responsible for tracking every viewer's streaming habits, likes, and dislikes (actors, directors, movie genres, etc.), providing a list of suggested movies or shows after that analysis (if they could even complete it) would be nearly impossible. Just to begin, you'd need over 710 million data analysts just to review 24 hours' worth of data...more if you want to keep up with the data generated during those 24 hours.
For Netflix, the streaming company's ace-in-the-hole is an AI marketing solution that not only analyzes viewer streaming habits and general likes and dislikes.
Netflix's AI also analyzes viewers' favorite genres, least-watched genres, favorite actors and actresses, and more to deliver the right message to the right person at just the right time.
For example, Netflix's AI marketing software doesn't present movie "covers" as they appeared in theaters or elsewhere. Instead, the platform might show an image of one of the movie's lesser-known characters — which is quite apropos when the actor is one of the viewer's favorites.
Company: Chase Bank
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AI marketing use: Machine learning (ML)
- AI marketing goal: Improve campaign copy
Chase wasn't having much luck with its marketing assets — they just weren't connecting with bank customers on a personal level. Persado is a creative agency in New York applying AI solutions to marketing campaigns.
Chase trialed Persado's service in 2019, and surprisingly, Persado's ML + AI solutions actually infused Chase Bank's creative copy with the personality it needed! That same year, Chase signed a multi-year deal with Persado to provide the bank with creative copywriting and marketing services.
How marketers use AI in marketing campaigns
While more innovative applications for AI are born every day, today's top use cases for AI marketing tools include:
- Personalizing customer content with the use of AI chatbots, AI-powered email marketing, or AI content creation
- Gleaning insights from predictive analytics of the above activities
- Deciding new markets, demographics, or products to target
- Using AI for social media management
When should you use AI marketing tools?
Even if you're unsure how AI fits into your business plan, it's a marketing solution worth looking into.
AI marketing tools can eliminate a lot of mundane, repetitive, or labor-intensive tasks you or your marketing team are used to performing, such as:
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Personalizing content. This is one of the top ways marketers implement AI marketing tools into the business — AI chatbots, personalized emails, targeted landing pages, and more help shape a customer's journey and experience in real time and can sometimes mean the difference between dazzling a new customer and losing a brand loyalist.
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Analyzing data. Data analysis, as mentioned, may very well be the main reason companies of all sizes first entertained the idea of welcoming artificial intelligence into the business. AI solutions can gather, sort, analyze, and even make decisions using vast datasets — learn what makes your customers tick when you employ an AI solution that scans your CRM and marketing campaign data, then summarizes its discoveries.
- **Generating content. AI marketing tools can help you create captions for images and video scripts and copy for social posts, emails, and — when used attentively with human intervention (as in heavy editing and fact-checking) — can even write posts for your site's blog.
Other uses of AI in marketing include:
- Sales forecasts
- Customer experience improvements
- SEO assistance and automation
In fact, SEO assistance (aside from data analysis) offers significant advantages for businesses over brands that don't use AI for SEO purposes. An algorithm can look at how your competitors are using artificial intelligence and machine learning for their online advertising and digital marketing, how they're doing it, and if they're doing it right, as well as monitor your site traffic and check for keywords that can boost your rankings.
**Please note: We honestly care about the life of your business and brand. Don't try this at home, folks! Don't attempt to generate readable AI content by yourself using some prompts you found on a trendy social channel. Generating content using AI marketing tools can generate handsome payoffs, as Chase Bank discovered — but if not used responsibly and with care, it can be dangerous to your reputation. It could even lead to you losing rights to the content you've created because content created with artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted.
We know — it's a lot to think about. If you'd like to chat with someone before deciding, schedule a meeting with Scripted Content Studio:
Or, if you're ready to see the Scripted Difference in action, register now for a 30-day free demo of the Scripted Platform.
How Scripted Can Help
If you've been here before, you likely recognize a few faces. Many of our current writers and editors are Scripted veterans who've been with us since the very beginning.
If you haven't visited us in a while, you can see something's different… we're not the same Scripted. We're even better.
In fact, we've come a long way over the last decade. We've made it through endless search engine algorithm updates and the explosion of content marketing agencies and software programs. And now — right along with you — we're learning the ropes and feeling our way through today's latest challenge: artificial intelligence in content marketing.
But — we're pretty sure we've perfected the pivot.
We decided to adopt AI marketing tools to aid our writers, editors, and customers. No AI-generated content will ever make it past our built-in AI content detection system — it won't get the chance. It'll never make it past our eagle-eyed editors!
When you need AI efficiency or human creativity that's the Scripted difference. See for yourself with a free demo of Scripted Platform.
