Marketing With The Help Of Artificial Intelligence

When to Use It, When to Say No

‍

Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn't just available for content generation anymore. It is changing how we live and manage our lives and work. This includes planning dinners, finding sales leads, and giving relationship advice. 

For marketers, artificial intelligence has changed the game. It gives us new ways to create, automate, and improve our work. This helps us boost conversion rates and do tasks more efficiently.

As businesses rush to stay up to date and automate and optimise their efforts, a nagging question is rising in the minds of brands using it.

“When does AI enhance marketing, and when does it hurt your brand, connection, or credibility?”

In this blog, we talk about strategic decisions around using cutting-edge AI in your marketing and, just as importantly, when to give it a miss. 

Boosting Efficiency: The Real Benefits of AI in Marketing

It’s clear that AI tools can supercharge your marketing efficiency, improve customer experience and help you get found on search engines, minus the costly software previously needed. 

Used effectively, AI can free up time, uncover insights in data, write copy in seconds, and personalise your comms at scale. Essentially, it is helping teams do more with less.

Here's where AI demonstrates its worth:

• Personalisation & Segmentation: AI-powered platforms like Klaviyo or HubSpot can analyse user behaviour to tailor content, recommendations, and email journeys instantly.
• Predictive Analytics: Tools, including Google Ads' Smart Bidding or Meta Advantage+, use machine learning models to optimise for conversions and provide insights and estimates on future results based on large amounts of data.
• Customer Service Automation: AI chatbots can handle FAQs 24/7, reducing support costs while maintaining prompt response times.
• Content Optimisation: From ChatGPT, Jasper, Clearscope, Surfer SEO, and Grammarly, AI enables marketers to produce faster, on-brand content that ranks well in search, all while reducing hours required to do so.

Fact: Studies by McKinsey found that companies that use AI-driven personalisation can see a 10-15% increase in revenue. 

Bottom line: If a task is data-heavy, repetitive, or time-consuming, AI is a game-changer that frees up marketers so they can focus on high-value efforts to drive  ROI.

The Red Flags: When AI Starts Doing More Harm Than Good

As with any tool or platform we use for marketing, misuse is where things can start to get a bit messy.

Here are some common signs that AI might be damaging your brand:

• Generic, lifeless content: AI-generated blogs and emails can lack your brand's tone, voice, and uniqueness. Your brand becomes one of many, not one in a million. Not ideal.
• Loss of human touch: Over-relying on automation, especially in customer communication, can leave audiences feeling like ‘just a number’, and not considered.
• Ethical blind spots: AI models are trained on existing data, which means they can run the risk of replicating biases, excluding marginalised voices, or misinterpreting context. The power of AI, although a great driver of efficiency, can communicate things about your brand that don’t reflect your views.
• Shortcuts over strategy: Using AI to churn out content without clarity or purpose can harm your SEO results and erode the trust and loyalty of your audiences. Don’t forget that those reading your content need to engage with it - through consistency and good quality content, it’s often a less-is-more situation.
• AI can make mistakes: it's essential to fact-check outputs you get from AI  by requesting sources for the information to ensure you're not unintentionally misleading your audience.

Here's an example of when AI got it wrong: 

When Air Canada's chatbot gave a grieving customer false information about bereavement fares, it led to a costly refund and public backlash. It certainly didn't help matters when the airline initially tried to blame the ‘bot’ itself.

‍

The Human Factor: What AI Still Can't Replace

There are still functions of marketing where us humans will always reign supreme.

AI can assist, but it can't:

• Craft a resonant brand story rooted in lived experience, emotion, and nuance
• Judge the timing, context, and ethics of a message in real time

Marketing is, at its core, about understanding people. When used well, AI can enhance efficiency and reduce acquisition costs, making it a powerful partner.

Tip: Use AI to amplify creativity, not substitute the human input.

Future-Proofing Your Marketing: Blending AI With Human Insight

The future isn't AI vs humans, it's AI with humans.

Here's how forward-thinking marketers are blending both:

• Train your team to work with AI, not fear it. AI is becoming a core tool and skillset.
• Implement internal AI policies centred on transparency, bias monitoring, data security and brand voice guidelines.
• Audit regularly: Are your AI tools still aligned with your customers' needs and your team's goals?
• Champion originality: Keep investing in creative ideation, human interviews, and storytelling; that's where the real magic happens.
  
  

Your Most Valuable Marketing Asset is still your judgment.

AI is a valuable asset, not a licence to automate without thought and your special sauce.

Knowing when to use it and when not to is now a core marketing consideration. As tech evolves at an incredibly fast pace, remember to balance efficiency with consideration.

Always ask yourself:

• Where could AI save our team time and boost ROI?
• Where could it dilute our brand or push away our audience?
  

Try that this week and let your judgment be your guide.

Want to know more about great AI optimisations in Marketing that we do with our clients?

Get in touch, we'd love to chat! It is changing how we live and manage our workflows.