From Chatbots to Smart Content: The Endless Possibilities of AI Marketing

The team at Hammer Marketing is slightly obsessed with AI content. Our Slack chats are filled with who did it better, Lee, or any one of the various AI-content-creating sites we’ve come across, and honestly, sometimes it’s a toss-up. Beyond challenging the teams’ egos, we’ve found machine-learning technology has really upped our marketing game. AI is here and could very well be the future of marketing. Are you ready?

According to a recent McKinsey Global Study, marketing and sales will see the biggest financial lift by using AI in the immediate future. That means if you’re not using AI in your marketing, you could be missing out on possibly the most transformative technology of the decade.

How can your brand benefit from AI?

Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

Don’t worry marketers, AI will not replace you – but it can help increase productivity, speed, and automated decisions based on data. You may already be using AI-based automation in your email campaigns and paid search, but the actual possibilities are endless.

Use Cases:

• Chatbots: Using NLP (natural language processing) technology allows AI chatbots to make reasonably human conversations with customers in real time. This alleviates the frustrating on-hold-forever-help loop.
• Media Buying: Predicting the most effective ad placements for maximum ROI. 
• Data Analysis: Collecting and sorting marketing data from campaigns and engagements.
• Content Generation: Creating content such as video captions, email subject lines, web copy, blogs, and more.
• Real-Time Personalization: Predictive analysis can optimize your users’ experience with customized suggestions based on past engagements. This works well for product recommendations, suggested reading, or anticipating pain points and roadblocks, and offers a solution.
• Fraud Detection: eCommerce sites can be susceptible to payment fraud, grinch bots, and other shady shoppers. Machine-learning software can minimize risk by profiling and detecting threats before they cause damage.
• Lead Qualification: Dynamic lead scoring can evaluate and qualify the buying intent of website visitors and then funnel them to the next step. 

Smart Content – How Not to Be Dumb About It

Smart content, but is it really? So far, we’ve talked about cutting-edge technology and what it can do for us – but just because it can doesn’t always mean it should. Let’s explore some things we should consider before using AI in these situations.

Don’t Try to Game the System

If you’re in marketing you probably already have a healthy fear of Google’s algorithmic consequences; but just in case you don’t, let me spell it out for you. Poor quality content and/or duplicate content will be detected on your site, and if you have a mass amount of it – it will tank your rankings. Use AI data to brainstorm, research, and inspire your content, but create unique, quality content that will engage your target audience.

Use AI to Stand Out, Not Blend In

Feed your AI-generation platform-specific details to get a unique product. Look at the difference between images with and without details. The first request was for a box, and that’s exactly what we got. A box. Likely the same box that anyone else who typed in “box,” would receive.

The second request is filled with details, a specific style was picked, and a starting image was provided.

Adding specific details and imagery gives us a very unique box that fits our needs.

AI Is Still a Baby

It’s exciting and fun, but still in its infancy – and we need to treat it as such. AI videos and AI avatars are unpolished. NLP is amazing, but still not perfect. Using these tools will help to further your reach but be cautious. Triple-check everything before it is put out to the world. A simple slip of the robot-tongue or insensitive phrasing could ruin your brand’s credibility. 

Let’s Take It For a Spin

I fed an AI content generator this prompt: “A paragraph about the risks and rewards of AI content generation. This is what it wrote, in milliseconds.

The Only Acceptable AI Takeover

We won’t be trading in our brains for computer chips anytime soon, but it doesn’t mean we can’t let a bit of AI into our strategy. Given the right parameters and enough starting information, AI can help point your digital strategy in the right direction. Finding out where to start or how to best use AI can be daunting, but at Hammer Marketing, we’ve been using it for all kinds of projects…and when Lee doesn’t want to write blogs. Let us help you fine-tune your efforts and put AI to work for your brand.