AI is on everyone’s lips or social media posts, it would seem.
It can be difficult to work out what the positives and what the negatives are. Many industries are will continue to be impacted by the development of AI.
Jobs will be lost and other jobs will be created as a result of this new – or not so new – technology. Marketing is no exception. In many ways AI is a great fit for marketing campaign planning.
For one, AI tools help marketers streamline their workload.
AI can support some content creation needs, can add a certain type of creativity which otherwise is not so easy to duplicate and is particularly good at using analytics to help marketers make better decisions.
Here are ways you can leverage AI for your marketing campaigns without giving up on quality or professionalism.
Audience analytics and customer feedback
A brand’s marketing is only ever as good as its customer insights.
AI can support organisations in developing a clearer picture of how customers views of their brand. From simple tools such as Quriobot, your own chatbot, which collect information from your customer to AI sentiment collectors such as SMG which bring data together from unstructured text, such as feelings, opinions or frustrations expressed across platforms, users and geographical locations can be invaluable to understanding the pressure points you need to address.
Using this type of data analytics allows marketers to get a general feel of where customers are struggling with a brand.
To ensure you develop the right counter measures, you will want to use some more traditional forms of feedback to query those assumptions.
That might be through a focus group or individual interviews. You can then use those to also prompt for the solutions you are considering. The interplay between AI and human questioning and personal engagement can then deliver great dividends in terms of meeting your customer needs right at the heart of their pain points.
Message definition
Marketing teams thrive on developing the right message and ensuring that content reflects that message.
It can, however, take up a lot of time and a lot of human resources to get the right people in the room and to undertake the right kind of ideation.
The world of AI, again, offers some useful tools. To be clear, the most useful tools, at present, deliver on content, not necessarily on the creation of the message. But there are a few which do.
Sprinkler helps teams or individuals with message crafting, but cannot ensure that the message is unique.
However, Sprinkler, for instance, allows you to brainstorm content ideas but also product descriptions. Again, human input is essential. You know your product and service and you should know your customer and competitor.
Based on that knowledge you can then query your choice of AI and come as close as possible to a unique message.
Lazier marketers will not do any of this and simply use content AI has produced for them. This is a risky game and will eventually water down your message among the many other brands which use the same content slot machine.
Ready-made content
This is the area AI is currently making marketing waves.
There are numerous tools which will provide ready-made content. A question such as give me 10 ideas of the best way to use video for social media will deliver a sound list of just that.
More interesting, however, are tools such as Anyword, which uses data on human behaviour in relation to certain words to help you create the most effective wording for your advertising or social media content.
You can also use it to create your typical seven touchpoints with your brand or message, by creating similar content across seven different channels of communication.
The well-known Jasper, of course, will write content for you and do so very effectively as long as your input is clear.
Super interesting are image creators such as Midjourney and Dall-E, both of which create images based on word descriptions.
As this is somewhat more specific it can allow for greater uniqueness in terms of output, yet the tool is still limited and can, of course, only dig as deep as the input it was originally given.
Below three images created on the subject of Marketing Strategy, each in a different style.
The ability to modify these is limited and somewhat of a guessing game, but once you have found a certain style you like you can certainly create a set of images which will be recognisable against your campaign.
One of the more engaging AI categories is for video production.
You can find tools to voice over your video for training courses, for instance, or create text for your video or create video out of images.
The options here seem pretty endless. Easy tools to work with are Pictory and Veed.io which offer editing, text to image captioning, talking heads and video collages.
Yet, when it comes to video and images, AI is not as creative nor can it get close to what your input requested. Images are not created but overlaid or mixed and can look somewhat ethereal. Voices, too, sound stilted, awkward, at times.
It really depends on whether the output can create the kind of engagement you are looking for. Initially, it might, but over time, will you want to continue with the style of images AI can create or will you want something more unique and more realistic looking? Essentially, will you want to be more authentic?
The following was created with an Avatar AI called Media.io. This could be a great tool to create your team’s avatars and use them on your about page rather than standard photos. But again, it is a question of whether this fits in with your brand character.
And while there are worries in the market about AI taking over areas of our life and work –potentially not to be underestimated – the most important thing to remember when using AI is that it is a tool and should serve you and your brand’s needs.
It should not override your brand. Your brand is valuable, potentially worth millions, and you do not want to water it down by using less-than-ideal data, messages or content.
Zeitgeist Communication Ltd is a BECBC member. To find out more go to: www.zeitgeistcomms.com
