Like it or not, AI is quickly changing the face of marketing as we know it. But, rather than fight it, businesses and marketers alike stand to benefit significantly from AI as a tool to help with marketing efforts.
While content remains king in marketing, AI may help businesses produce content more efficiently. This isn’t to say AI doesn’t have its faults. Like a self-driving car, AI requires a human ‘driver’ to ensure things go smoothly and only the highest quality content is on your page.
In this article, we discuss how you can use AI to market your business, some of the most popular AI tools, and three essential steps to take when using AI for your marketing content.
What is AI, and Where Did it Start?
AI stands for artificial intelligence. While the phrase is trending everywhere these days, it is not new. In fact, John McCarthy coined the phrase at Dartmouth College in 1956. Excitement over the concept of AI ebbed until the 1990s and 2000s, when the advent of faster computers made the complex process more attainable.
Today, AI surrounds us in our daily lives through chatbots like Siri and Alexa, grammar apps, and automated response technology on our smartphones. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, the AI industry is projected to grow by at least $500 billion by 2030.
Ways To Use AI Tools For Marketing
There are a plethora of ways you can use AI to build your brand awareness and create digital pathways to connect with your target audience. Many businesses, ourselves included, are already using AI as a tool in their marketing arsenal.
Some ways to leverage artificial intelligence for marketing include the following:
Interpret Data from Web Forms
Web forms are a great way to gather data on potential customers. AI can interpret data for you, saving time and organizing your data in a blink. Conversational interfaces also make data gathering more personalized for customers.
Idea Generation
Feeling stuck coming up with ideas for a blog post? Put a content description into an AI writer and see what pops up. You may be inspired by some of the topics it generates.
Summarizing
Sometimes, you just want to get to the meat of an article without reading 2,000 words. AI tools can break an article down into its key points. This saves you time and makes it easier to relay pertinent information to your audience.
Drafting Emails and Social Posts
AI can cut down on time when creating shorter pieces of content, such as emails and social media posts. AI allows you to automate email personalization and generate grammatically correct social media posts.
Generate Headlines
A good headline is arguably the most essential part of your content. AI can help you generate the perfect headline to earn clicks and rank well on search engines with its access to large amounts of data.
Ready to Use AI? Keep These 3 Things In Mind
Once you’re ready to use AI to up your marketing game, that doesn’t mean you are entirely out of the driver’s seat. To get the most out of your content, you must ensure the content you put out there is accurate and consistent. Building a brand is as much about establishing your voice as it is about having good SEO.
The acronym PER stands for prompt, edit, and review. Keep these three things in mind, and your content will be unstoppable.
Prompt
Understanding how an AI tool uses a prompt is important. Read up on the specific tool you are using and learn how to provide accurate prompts. Be specific in what you want the AI to produce. Try multiple prompts and see how the quality of the product changes.
Edit
AI is not perfect. You still have to do your due diligence and cross-check facts with reputable sources to ensure you aren’t releasing false information. You also want to be sure the content is in your brand’s tone and voice.
Review
We strongly recommend having a trusted person or another team member read your AI supported content before you post. Have them give feedback on things like readability, voice, and usefulness. This will give you an idea of how a reader may interact with your content, and if there are any lingering inauthentic feelings in the content.
Popular AI Tools for Marketing Small Business
There are countless AI tools out there – it could be a separate blog post –- but there are a few popular tools to start with.
Chat GPT – A Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (“GPT”, a kind of language model) Chatbot developed by Open AI. The chatbot has human-like interaction in a conversational manner with the user, excellent for prompt response of many kinds, including blog writing, caption writing, email writing, and more.
Jasper AI – This product is excellent for copywriting as it can write in various tones and styles. Just follow the steps above to ensure it has high readability and a consistent voice.
Writer.com – Created for marketing teams, this AI is great for collaboration. Teams who work remotely can rest assured knowing their content is consistent and clear.
Hemmingway – If you prefer using human writers, Hemingway App is a great AI tool for editing content. It provides a reading grade level and highlights areas demonstrating poor writing quality.
Grammarly – This is another AI tool that comes in handy for editing content. It will check for grammar, syntax, and word use redundancies. With their premium option, you have more tools, such as a plagiarism checker that ensures your content is original.
Headlime – Landing pages are an essential part of a user-friendly website. Headlime helps you optimize the content, suggests high-performing headlines, and auto-generates content as you type, saving you time and energy.
Relpy.io – Need help replying to emails promptly? Reply.io has a sales email assistant that can help with the tedious task of crafting standard email responses and automated email campaigns.
Looking to expand your content strategy with humans?
We level up the brands and marketing strategies of growing businesses like yours! Hop on a call and we’d love to answer any of your content strategy questions, and see if we’re a good fit for collaboration. Schedule a free vision call today.