In today’s fast-paced digital world, companies are always looking for ways to improve their marketing strategy and stay ahead of the competition. One area of technology that continues to gain popularity is artificial intelligence (AI). AI marketing can help businesses streamline their processes, generate new ideas, and create high-quality content that engages and converts their target audience.
In this blog post, we’ll explore what AI marketing is, the benefits it offers, and tips for using it effectively.
What is AI Marketing?
AI marketing refers to the use of artificial intelligence technology in marketing and advertising. This can include using AI to automate tasks, generate creative ideas, and create personalized content for customers. With AI marketing, businesses can save time and resources, improve the quality of their content, and deliver a more personalized experience for their target audience.
Some of the most popular options at the moment are ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 by OpenAI. Midjourney is another company doing impressive work in the space.
Of course, artificial intelligence has a wide range of applications outside of content creation, but we’ll be focusing on it’s use in content marketing in the article.
The Benefits of AI Marketing
- Increased Efficiency. One of the biggest benefits of AI marketing is that it can take care of many mundane tasks and processes that would otherwise require a human being. This frees up valuable time and resources for other aspects of your marketing. For example, you can use it to summarize data for a report.
- New Ideas and Insights. AI can also help generate new ideas and insights that you might not have thought of on your own. This can be particularly useful for research and planning purposes.
- Improved Content Quality. AI technology is constantly improving, and can now help you generate higher-quality content. You can input some of your content and contextual information and find out how to make it more engaging, relevant, and on-brand. This helps ensure that your content is consistent and professional.
The Importance of Good Prompt Engineering
There are some things artificial intelligence is good at, and some things it struggles with. Take these hideous logos, for example.
As an experiment, we tried to create some logos with DALL-E 2 and, as you can see, it struggles with text. It also struggles to translate basic descriptions of what a company does into concepts and then into images that represent those concepts. (At least it did in this case).
Part of the problem is poor prompt engineering.
Some of the challenges you’ll face when writing prompts for AI include ensuring the prompts are specific enough to generate useful and relevant responses, but not so specific that the AI generates too limited a number of responses.
It’s essential to experiment with different types of prompts and to iterate and improve on those. If you decide to make AI a permanent part of your marketing process you should create a prompt book (like this DALL-E 2 prompt book) where you collect certain phrases that generate desirable results predictably.
Better inputs will lead to better results. But still, it can feel like getting a usable image is a matter of chance more than anything.
Here are some masterpieces generated by the prompt “painting of a hot dog by edward hopper.”
Here are some less masterful works generated by the prompt “3d render of a large crowd stuck to a big magnet.”
These don’t look too bad at first glance, but as you zoom in it’s easy to spot several imperfections with the “people.”
How We Used AI to Create a Blog Post
Artificial intelligence is great for brainstorming content ideas and finding links between different subjects. For example, we asked GPT for some content ideas that combined lead generation and pop culture and GPT helped us come up with How to Generate Leads the Marvel Way.
- We started with ChatGPT to get some ideas about how we could link lead generation to something in pop culture.
- We fed ChatGPT some articles on how Stan Lee did things differently when he was starting out at Marvel and some information about the Marvel Method. We asked it to list how Stan Lee did things differently, and how marketers could apply those principles to lead generation.
- Then we asked how the Marvel Method was different from other techniques for developing comics and asked how marketers could apply those principles to lead generation.
- We asked it to create an acrostic poem with initial letters that spell MARVEL.
- Next, we asked DALL-E to create a pencil drawing of a superhero.
- Then we asked DALL-E to create “the letter M by Jack Kirby” and the rest of the letters in “MARVEL.”
- Then we wrote the article and created an infographic with the images.
- Finally, we ran the whole thing through Copyscape to make sure ChatGPT didn’t plagiarize anything.
- Then we put it in our CMS and published it.
Tips for Using AI in Marketing
- Start Small. When using AI in marketing, it’s important to start small and experiment with different types of prompts and applications. This will help you understand what works best for your business, and what needs improvement.
- Fact-Checking is a Must. ChatGPT will very confidently tell you things that are convincing but untrue. Still, the end result is about as good as you could get from a freelance writer who charges about $0.10/word. It requires the same level of fact-checking and editing. (Of course, ChatGPT won’t improve based on your feedback – unless you’re training it somehow – and it won’t always be free.)
- Provide Sources. Instead of leaving the AI to its own devices, feed it the sources you want it to draw information from. This has the added benefit that you will know what to cite.
- Human Oversight is Essential. You’ll still need a person. Not just to develop the prompts, but also to monitor for errors, bias, and other problems that may arise as a result of the model’s training.
- Use it to Increase Efficiency. Don’t expect artificial intelligence to do the work for you (at least not yet). But find ways to be more efficient by letting AI handle mundane marketing tasks like summarizing statistics for a blog post.
Harness the Power of AI in Your Marketing Efforts
AI marketing is a powerful tool that can help businesses streamline their processes, generate new ideas, and create high-quality content that engages and converts their target audience. It’s still critical to have human oversight, and that will likely be the case for some time to come (at least). So the marketers who figure out how to work with AI will be in high demand in the coming years.