5 Top Tips – using AI in your marketing

For those who missed it, here are a few of the takeaways from our recent webinar, hosted by Paul Ince from LikeMind Media.

There’s all kinds of talk about what AI will be able to do in the future, but what can you use it for right now?

Some people are wary of AI, but more and more marketers are using it as a tool to make their jobs easier. And that’s the key; to think of it as a tool. It can’t do what you do, and certainly can’t replace you, but it might be able to save you some time to dedicate to more important tasks.

What are some areas of marketing where you could try using AI?

Content ideas
Content creation (text, images, video)
Customer interaction
Analytics
Advertising
Multilingual promotion

Remember that you are the boss. You decide what AI does or doesn’t do in your business. It should be a helpful tool, and not something that makes you nervous.

Writing tools: anyword, copy.ai, jasper, writesonic, frase, rytr, copysmith

Top tip 1 – Use AI for your testing variants

You, the human, knows your product and your customers. You, the human, are best placed to come up with your promotional copy. But say you’re building a new social campaign and you need five or six different variations of an ad; why not write the first one and let an AI writing tool come up with suggestions for the variants? You could save yourself hours. You can even ask it to optimise the copy for different social media platforms.

Top tip 2 – Beat your fear of the blank page

A blank page can be daunting when you have an article or advert or report to write. So try using an AI content creation tool to write the first draft for you. You then have an editing job rather than a writing-from-scratch job, which for many feels less arduous. Edit thoroughly though, looking out for phrasing that doesn’t sound natural, or uncommon spellings. You may end up only keeping a few of the AI’s words, or a few ideas on how to structure it, but there will almost certainly be some elements that inspire you, and help you finish the piece in your own words.

AI's attempt to create a photo image of a giraffe drinking that has gone horribly wrong, with two necks and no feet

Top tip 3 – AI prompts

Your prompts need to be really accurate to get the best results from your AI tool. Try asking Google for examples of good prompts while you are getting used to AI and how to talk to it. Your instructions need to be incredibly precise, because as smart as it is AI cannot think the way you do, and won’t always fill in the blanks in a way that we would consider to be logical.

Top tip 4 – Watch out for bias

AI systems only know what they’ve been told, and it’s humans who have told them. AI can therefore be susceptible to creating text or images with the bias of the humans who taught it. Be vigilant, and make sure your use of AI isn’t perpetuating stereotypes or alienating any of your customers.

Top tip 5 - Do not use AI for research

There have been instances of AI making up reports and investing data, opening people up to legal challenges and damaging business reputations. Your research needs to be robust and fact-checked, so AI is NOT the tool for it right now.