How AI can make marketing more effective
Marketing is about connections: finding and connecting the things—your products—with customer needs. So it’s no surprise that a new wave of conversational AI tools that use technology to create content can also be used to help optimize marketing workflow and efficacy. Let’s look at a few ways conversational artificial intelligence can help improve marketing strategy.
What is AI marketing?
AI marketing is the new buzzword for marketing departments everywhere. It’s about using conversational AI tools to enhance marketing materials, from helping evaluate the effectiveness of existing strategies to helping generate new marketing ideas and content.
Evaluate your existing marketing
There is more to evaluating marketing plans than typing a company name into Google and hoping to land on the first page of search results. New AI tools can provide a dispassionate, data-based analysis of content marketing as well as use AI smarts to suggest ways to improve it.
- AISEO.ai: If you have content that’s already written, it makes sense to use it as widely as possible. AISEO offers a broad range of tools to help with this, but my favorite is the content repurposer. Point this free tool at something like a blog post, and it can rewrite it into a Twitter campaign, an email, or even a script for a YouTube video. AISEO also offers a neat tool called the Paraphraser, which uses AI to tweak your written content, including shortening, extending, and even changing the tone of it for different audiences.
- Growthbar: There are plenty of SEO tools that will analyze your content and suggest ways to make it rank better on Google. Growthbar takes it a step further, providing feedback and suggestions in the browser itself. That means you can use it to help analyze existing content to make the most of existing marketing materials. Once the service learns a site, it can also use its AI smarts to suggest internal links to help promote content and services. That is especially valuable for older sites with legacy content. This AI tool can spot connections that others might not.
- Browse.ai: You might know your own website, but what about those of your competitors? This tool can analyze your competitors’ sites in a variety of ways. It could, for instance, scan a competitor’s site every day and notify you of price changes. It can also access sites behind paywalls or Captchas, so it’s a great tool for staying competitive. Brands can leverage it to point at their own sites to ensure everything works properly; the AI tool can report any broken links or other problems.
- Grammarly: This is an invaluable tool for anyone who writes. At the simplest level, it is a kick-ass grammar and spelling checker far superior to the ones built into Word or Google Docs. It’s compatible with both, but can also work within most popular content management systems (CMS) and text software, as well as most web browsers. It offers suggestions and corrects common errors as you type. But that’s just the beginning: It can also advise on tone, readability, and engagement. The last is vital for marketing materials: Will it hook readers and keep them engaged? Grammarly also has big plans to add features like ideation: Users will be able to feed the app prompts, and it will brainstorm concepts, help create new approaches, and spark new ideas. The company calls it augmented intelligence.
Create new personalized content
Once you’ve used AI to optimize existing marketing content, it’s time to start generating new materials. Here are a few of the best AI tools to help you create new marketing content.
- Jasper.ai: As the name suggests, Jasper uses AI to provide inspiration. Feed the system a few prompts, and it can crank out anything from Instagram captions to essays on the meaning of life, providing multiple options. Choose whichever option you prefer, and the system “learns,” optimizing for user preferences over time. It can also generate art from existing marketing assets, tweaking them in new ways. While it’s possible to cut and paste the results into a CMS, Jasper is, perhaps, better used as inspiration, helping find new angles, perspectives, and ways to create fresh marketing content.
- Smartly.io: Want to evaluate the effectiveness of making changes to marketing strategies? You’ll need an AB test, in which two different campaigns are tested at the same time to see which is more effective. But why stop there? Smartly is a campaign manager that can create A, B, and C, along with many more campaigns, as well as provide feedback on how they might perform. It uses AI to evaluate efficacy, and can run all of the variants automatically, delivering feedback on ROI.
- Smartwriter.ai: Every good marketer knows that personalization works, especially when it comes to noisy mediums like email. Smartwriter is a tool that can create personalized emails automatically, whether you are doing cold calls or writing to an existing customer. The deep enrichment feature could be especially useful for cold calls because it uses AI to research leads, digging into content and tweaking templates based on what it finds.
Will conventional marketing be replaced by AI?
In a word: no. Conversational AI is a tool that can provide new ideas and help refine existing marketing practices. But it isn’t going to replace the role of the marketing person. There still has to be someone behind these tools to create the guiding identity, evaluate the results, and sign the checks. Conversational AI marketing tools can help find new angles and present new ideas, but they can’t replace the person who comes up with ideas and concepts. Instead, they can make this person more efficient and help them make more of the resources they have.
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