AI in Marketing: How It Works + Examples

If you’re not using AI in marketing, you’re already falling behind. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are becoming more and more prominent, and many have functions specifically designed to help marketers better promote their products and services.

Throughout this article, we’re going to dive deeper into what AI in marketing looks like, sharing the benefits of taking advantage of AI, how AI can be used in marketing, plus some AI marketing tools to get you started.

Key Takeaways

• AI can provide a number of benefits for your marketing team, like speeding up tedious tasks, providing you with better insights, and boosting your overall results.
• You can use AI as part of your content planning and creation process, to gather competitive insights, to improve your customer service, and more.
• There are a number of AI tools that can help you automate processes and streamline your strategy.

Benefits of Using AI in Marketing

Why should you incorporate AI into your marketing strategy? There are so many benefits that these tools can bring to your team—if you use them right.

Speed Up Processes

AI can help marketers speed up processes and spend less time conducting certain tasks manually. According to HubSpot’s State of AI Report, 79% of marketers agree that AI helps them to spend less time on manual tasks, showing just how valuable these new tools can be.

Improve Personalization

AI can analyze customer data at scale, helping you to gather more insights and understand how to better personalize your content and segment your audience. Better personalization can provide your business with better results from your marketing campaigns.

Better Insights

Because AI can analyze data more effectively than humans can, you can get better insights. For example, AI analysis can help you identify trends earlier, forecast sales and customer behavior more efficiently, and help your marketing team make better decisions.

Cost Savings

Incorporating AI tools into your team’s daily processes can save time and resources, resulting in cost savings within your marketing budget. While AI shouldn’t replace core human workers, there are certain tasks that it can take off their plates, letting them focus on things that actually impact your business’s bottom line.

Higher ROI

Because AI tools can help your marketing team better understand customers, personalize campaigns, and ship better content, you’ll see a higher return on investment (ROI) as a result. Start using AI within your day-to-day marketing tasks to see how it can help improve your performance.

How AI Works With Marketing: 9 Use Cases

Because AI is a newer technology, you might not be sure how it works with marketing quite yet. However, there are a number of key use cases that AI can help with.

• Content planning: AI chatbots can be a huge help in brainstorming content ideas. Tell the chatbot about your business and your overall content goals and ask for topics that you may not have covered yet. You can then run the ideas through an SEO tool to find top keywords to center your content around.
• Content creation: While AI shouldn’t be handling the entire content creation process, it can still provide some assistance. Get help creating a comprehensive outline, get ideas for your introduction, or get AI to start with a summary that you can expand on.
• Marketing automation: Incorporate AI tools into your marketing automation workflows to further your team’s productivity. AI tools can be used as a step within your workflows or they can help you set up new workflows, improving efficiency.
• Customer service: AI can be a huge help within customer service. Use an AI-powered chatbot on your website to help answer basic customer questions while also escalating issues to a human service representative for larger issues. This can make sure your customer service team is only having to deal with major issues, with AI responding to all smaller queries.
• Audience segmentation: AI tools can analyze large amounts of customer data, helping you to segment out your audience in a much more effective way than if your team were analyzing the information themselves. Segmentation can help you create more personalized campaigns and marketing efforts.
• Social listening: Incorporate AI into your social listening strategy to more quickly analyze the data, understand overall sentiment, and generate a summary of overall customer conversations. This type of AI assistance can make your social listening strategy much more effective.
• Competitive intelligence: Again, because AI is such a powerful tool when it comes to analyzing data, it can be a huge help when looking at competitive insights. Discover how your competitors are faring in comparison to your own performance, plus analyze market trends to see what you can expect in the future.
• Predictive analytics: Similarly, AI can also be used to predict customer behavior, taking a look at past campaigns and forecasting future results based on historical data. This can be a huge help when creating new campaigns so that you can make them better than ever.
• Administrative tasks: AI is also hugely helpful with basic administrative tasks like data entry, scheduling, pulling reports, and more. Use AI for the boring manual tasks to free up your team’s time for more important work.

3 Examples of AI in Marketing

Let’s look at some real life examples of businesses using AI in ways that market their products or make working with their business feel more appealing.

Spotify

Spotify is a music streaming service that recently launched its own AI product to help its users have a better listening experience. This AI product is called “DJ,” and it analyzes your top songs and plays music based on your past listening habits.

The DJ will play five songs that all come with a similar vibe, then come back onto the “mic” to share your next five songs. If there’s a set of songs that listeners aren’t interested in, they can tap the “DJ” icon to move onto the next set.

It’s a unique experience that really helps to set Spotify apart from other streaming platforms.

Curlsmith

Curlsmith is a beauty brand focused on curl care. It has a chatbot widget on its website to help customers find what they’re looking for.

As you can see, the chatbot responses are all “Automated with AI.” Customers can use this chatbot to:

• Find the right products for their curl type
• Check in on a recent order
• Ask questions about shopping with Curlsmith
• Ask about discounts
• Change an order

There are programmed responses, but if a user says that they need additional help, there’s a conversational AI chatbot implemented as well that will analyze a user’s response in order to provide them with the best customer service.

Heinz

Heinz put together a creative ad campaign a couple of years ago and used AI to help them build it. The ad told the story of how the Heinz team typed “ketchup” into an AI image generator, and the output was a ketchup bottle with a logo that looked eerily similar to the Heinz logo.

The campaign essentially said, “even AI knows ketchup is Heinz,” and showcased several other prompts the team ran through the AI image generator, all including the word “ketchup,” and the output they received.

This was a creative way to incorporate AI tools in a marketing campaign that also provided an extremely effective result.

AI Marketing Tools to Use

If you want to get started incorporating artificial intelligence into your marketing strategy, you need to find the right tools to use. Below, we introduce you to six different AI marketing tools, each with its own use case.

ChatGPT – AI Chatbot

ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that can provide answers to anything you type into the text box. It can help with things like:

• Brainstorming
• Outlining
• Conducting research
• Optimizing content
• Analyzing your market

But ChatGPT can honestly help with nearly any request you might have for it. You can also upload Excel files and have it analyze historical data, helping you generate predictive analytics, forecast customer behavior, and gather competitive insights, even without tools that are more catered to those capabilities.

If you don’t use any other AI tool, you should at least have a ChatGPT account under your belt.

Pricing: Completely free for limited (but still extensive) use. To get access to more models and more capabilities, premium plans start at $20/month.

Jasper – Content Generation

If you’re looking for help with your content generation, Jasper is the perfect tool for you. The tool provides an intuitive workspace that makes it easy to generate content at scale, optimize content so it hits every mark, conduct research to fully flesh out your content, and more.

While Jasper is the ultimate content generation tool for marketers, it also offers AI agent capabilities. AI agents are tools that can operate autonomously, helping marketers get more done in less time.

Pricing: Plans start at $39/month/seat.

Midjourney – Image Generation

Midjourney is an AI-powered image generation platform. It was originally built through a Discord server (which still remains active), but now can be accessed through an easy-to-use web app. Users can input any text-based description, upload images for reference, and incorporate some of Midjourney’s built-in parameters to create images for any marketing needs.

Generate realistic images, animated images, surreal art, and more. Midjourney is also starting to delve into video generation, which can be a game changer for creating marketing video ads and commercials.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $8/month.

Hootsuite – Social Copy Generation

Hootsuite is a social media management platform, but it also offers a number of free AI-powered tools that can help marketers get ideas for their social copy and captions. Some of the available tools include:

• Caption generator
• Tweet generator
• Video title generator
• Video description generator
• Hashtag generator
• Username generator
• Social media bio generator
• Content ideas generator
• Blog ideas generator

Take advantage of these completely free tools to help you brainstorm more ideas and captions for your social media content. These free tools are also their own example of AI in marketing, as they help promote Hootsuite alongside providing free value.

Pricing: The AI-powered generators are completely free to access. Hootsuite’s suite of social media management tools start at $99/user/month.

Zapier – Marketing Automation

Zapier is an AI-powered marketing automation platform that makes it easy for marketers to set up automated workflows. Zapier works via “zaps” that connect tools together to create an automation that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

For example, automatically add leads to your CRM, automatically add your new blog posts to your social media content calendar, or automatically add new customers to a spreadsheet for tracking.

These are some basic zaps, though. Zapier also offers a number of extensive workflows that incorporate their AI capabilities, helping marketers to automate more complex tasks as well.

Pricing: Free for up to 100 tasks/month. For more usage, paid plans start at $19.99/month.

Tidio – Chatbot

Tidio is a chatbot software that enables businesses to create their own AI-powered chatbots for their customers to interact with. Users can get customer support from your AI bot, chat with your bot about product suggestions, and make appointments all through your Tidio chatbot.

Train the Lyro AI assistant with your business information so they can help customers out, while also escalating more serious concerns or more unique questions directly to a human customer service representative.

Pricing: Plans are flexible based on the number of conversations you expect to have per month. Get access to the tool for free for 50 conversations or less. Plans start at $24.17/month for 100 conversations and go up from there.

FAQs

What are some examples of AI in marketing today?

Chat bots, a form of artificial intelligence, are a common occurrence on business websites. Other examples within marketing include ad targeting, dynamic pricing, and ChatGPT.

How is AI changing the marketing industry?

The greatest impact that AI has had on the marketing industry is in the automation of repetitive tasks. This frees up times for digital marketers to focus on larger-scale projects and higher level strategy. 

How to use AI in digital marketing?

Use AI where it actually helps. Automate tedious tasks like reporting, scheduling, and customer service. Use it to speed up content planning and pull insights from your data faster. Let AI handle repetitive tasks so your team can focus on strategy and creative work.

Should you trust AI tools?

AI tools, in and of themselves, are nothing to be feared. There is nothing inherently bad about AI or AI tools. However, you do want to review any work that comes out of them to avoid concerns like plagiarism or inaccuracy.

AI Is the Future of Marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a key part of marketing these days. You can use the tools to help generate content for your marketing campaigns, analyze results, predict upcoming trends, and so much more. To get even more ideas for how to use AI in your marketing efforts, check out our arsenal of AI tools.

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