AI Marketing Tools – How AI Can Benefit Digital Marketers
How AI Can Benefit Digital Marketers
AI Marketing Tools – Digital marketing requires each practitioner to be a human Swiss army knife. You have to understand search, UX, ad buying, copywriting, creative, community management, analytics, and more. And whether you’re a generalist or specialist, you always have to be learning, growing, and adapting to the latest developments.
There’s always a new channel, technology, feature, or algorithm change you have to be on top of, and client/employer expectations are always growing, evolving, and youthening. But AI can help you stay competitive and profitable, by empowering you to get more done in less time, while providing new capabilities never before possible.
How Can AI Help Me?
You’ve no doubt heard about or used chatbots, or read a few things about AI-generated copywriting, but you might not be aware of the full range of what AI can do. There are now AI-powered tools available for every major domain of digital marketing.
But you don’t have to worry. AI is in no position to replace a skilled marketer. Not yet, anyway. Despite the growing importance of data, analytics, and automation, marketing is still very much a human equation, reliant heavily on creativity, intuition, psychology, and empathy for success. AI in digital marketing today largely exists to enhance this success, by eliminating a lot of the tedium, repetition, and number crunching (all things machines handle better than people) from your workday. In short, if you’re a digital marketer who often find themself saying while working, “I wish I had a kid to do this,” it’s probably time to consider AI.
AI Handles The Grind
AI can do a lot of the time-sucking tasks often involved in digital marketing, the slow-moving busywork that is more about endurance than skill. This frees up you and your mental bandwidth for things more worthy of your time, such as creativity, strategizing, and higher-level decision making, those value-added elements help a skilled human like you get paid. In other words, it makes your working hours more productive, making it easier to earn and to learn, whether it’s by copywriting, analyzing copywriting, analyzing data, making recommendations, or optimizing your website or ad spend.
New Tricks For Old Dogs
AI can also do new things that weren’t possible before, typically because of the sheer scale at which it can work. An AI can analyze billions of datasets, or pieces of content, and look for trends. And it can do so with a much greater reach than was possible before. If there’s a particular influencer you’re interested in working with, for example, an AI can track every piece of content that their name is attached to, anywhere on the web.
So What’s Available For Me?
A few AI-based tools, such as the Hemingway app for writers, have come to prominence, but the full range or what AI can do for digital marketers is not so well-known, and is really quite impressive. If you follow this link, you’ll see over 100 tools that use AI, covering everything from automated content personalization to video ad generation, too many topics to cover in a single blog. But, we’ll go through the major domains.
Adding AI to paid advertising enables automated optimization of digital ad spend, in part or in whole. Basically, an AI can analyze the data and make recommendations for how to improve things, whether that’s by scaling a strong performing ad, or cutting back on a poor-performer, with you just needing to provide a simple yes or no, or you can fully-automate this if you choose. AI can also do other things like find better-performing segments in your audience, and adjust bids, all automatically if desired.
Of course, full automation requires a lot of trust, and an AI might not know all the context as to why an ad does well or doesn’t do well, and can’t appreciate that your company might want to keep running an ad even if it’s not performing very well (performance is not always the point of running an ad). There’s no substitute for doing your homework, but an AI can save you a lot of time.
UX
No matter how brilliant or experienced your creative and UX people are, there’s no substitute for A/B testing. Just because a landing page is beautiful and clever doesn’t mean that there isn’t another way to arrange things that’s less sexy but more effective. And just because a designer has “seen it all” doesn’t mean they can’t be surprised by some unexpected variable that’s improving or hurting conversions.
But AI can now fully automate the webpage A/B testing process. You don’t even need to choose or worry about what variables to change. AI can choose them for you based on statistical analysis, and test them out. In other words, AI can fully automate the optimization process of a landing page, a product page, or any other webpage where the goal is some type of conversion – very cool.
SEM
Writing copy variants for Google Ads, even if it pays well for the copywriter, can be a very tedious task. Your space is limited. Your choices are limited (by pre-assigned keywords). There’s a lot of repetition involved. Mistakes are easy to make (and not notice until it’s too late). It can take a long time to do. And copywriters often hate doing it, because they’re often working in Microsoft Excel (software for accountants not writers).
But now, AI can write the copy automatically and it can create new variants based on ads you’ve already done (human copywriters often stick to certain word patterns when they write and don’t use others). And AI won’t make the sort of errors that happen due to boredom or lapsed attention that a human copywriter can easily make, such as cut & paste errors that put copy in the wrong place.
Of course, writing is still very much a human skill, so it’s best to keep a human copywriter in the loop to doublecheck what the AI writes. Sometimes AI will give you something that’s just head-smackingly weird. But doublechecking what an AI writes might only take a copywriter a few minutes, instead of the few hours it would take to write it themselves.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the very definition of a timesuck. No matter how skilled you are in the Google seduction arts, there are no shortcuts with SEO. No ways to outthink it. No ways around. It’s a grind, and you’ve got do it. But AI Marketing tools can now handle a lot of that grinding. It can strategize (and adjust automatically to algorithm changes), find links, and index them. It can also find site errors, make optimization recommendations regarding code and content, and forecast traffic. Basically, AI can free your human SEO experts from the burden of all the worry and all the work, giving them more time to extract insights from data, get more backlinks, and answer more questions with content.
There are many AI Marketing tools already out there for analyzing, automating, and strategizing your owned social media. Many of which are not particularly smart, or even necessary. But influencers are another matter. You don’t own them. There’s a lot of fraud out there. And until very recently, if you wanted to find them, monitor them, or evaluate them, you were very much at the mercy of your agency.
But now AI can help you reach your own conclusions. You can monitor influencer content, identify top performers, compare yourself to competitors (or the industry average), find new influencers already talking about you, and justify changes to your strategy. Basically, you can bring the level of rigor that used to be reserved for your own social media and apply it to your influencers, and reduce your exposure to fraud, or being taken advantage of by an agency.
Content & Copywriting
AI is not yet ready to take over longer forms of writing, because, basically, the longer a piece of writing is, the less likely it is that AI can do it well. And people want to read content and copywriting that seems sprung from a human. And no, content is not a case of “build it and they will come.” There is virtually no SEO benefit to having an AI create mass quantities of content. Your SEO improves after people read the content, and share it, not before.
But there are a couple of instances where it can help. First, it can be used to improve human writing, like the Hemingway app, through natural language processing. Basically, Hemingway finds unnecessary words and awkward sentence constructions. There are also numerous other tools out there that can suggest or improve headlines and article titles.
And second, AI can be used to overcome the tyranny of the blank page. Creating something out of nothing is always harder than editing or rewriting it. There are AI marketing tools that can be used to get the ball rolling. This can be handy if you have a lot of paragraph-length things to do (like product descriptions) and want to save a little of the effort involved by removing the need to worry about how to begin.