There's no substitute for experience, but there are AI tools to make your marketing easier. Just keep in mind that easier doesn't always mean better. Marketing AI tools are arriving daily so it's important to know what's hype versus what's helpful. Here's my take:
HYPE
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Optimization: Major paid ad platforms (Google, Meta, etc) are building in AI and automatic recommendations based on its algorithms. In my experience these AI enhancements have delivered few performance gains. More often than not they just get you to spend more money with the ad platforms. Approach these with skepticism and do some tests rather than blindly adopt their recommendations.
Automated Social Content Creation: There are some great AI tools for image creation (more on this below), but I don't trust AI tools to come up with a series of creative and engaging social posts. Your social content needs to reflect your personality, people, and imagery unique to your business. Automated social content simply produces a generic stock image aesthetic. Don't use tools that contribute to AI slop. Be unique.
Replacing Marketing Staff: AI investments for improving business processes have a high failure rate. AI will likely get better but right now organizations still need people to review what AI is producing and fix errors. In the near term marketing jobs will not be taken by AI, but marketing people with AI skills will have more job opportunities.
HELP
Image Creation: There's various AI image/video creation tools and they keep getting better. Some of my favourites are Playground, OpenAI Sora, and Google Nano Banana. Canva also keeps improving and recently released a free suite of tools (Canva Affinity) to rival Adobe Suite. However, if you want something truly unique it's still worthwhile hiring a graphic designer.
Copywriting: Most people can drive a car but most can't drive a race car. The same goes for writing; most people can write but most are not professional writers. Tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, and Jasper aid tremendously in generating well written content. However, don't just use their output verbatim. It still needs adjustments to sound like you, a human.*
Data Analysis: Most marketers are not numbers people, but data analysis is an increasingly important part of the job. This is where AI tools can assist greatly. You can upload a spreadsheet (CSV) to ChatGPT and ask it to summarize key metrics, Google Analytics is building in AI to uncover website traffic insights, and Google NotebookLM can summarize multiple documents and produce a slide presentation.
* I did not use any AI copywriting tools for this blog post. I also think I'm a pretty good driver.
