By Ben Foster, Managing Partner of Digital
If you are yet to explore how the latest swathe of ground-breaking AI platforms can help automate and enhance your marketing, you need to start. Having lived through the supposed ‘year of mobile’ five years in a row, these days, I am pretty cynical about how quickly emerging trends become more mainstream. However, the opportunities created by AI platforms such as Chat GPT are too seismic and game-changing to ignore. By its very nature, the capabilities of this technology will grow exponentially, and there is no doubt it will have a material impact on how we work in unprecedented timeframes.
However, as a busy marketer working in a challenging climate, how do you go about something as diverse and all-encompassing as AI? Here are three ways you can use the technology to save time and money:
1. Paid Media Assets & Copy
Photoshoots to create new images as part of a creative refresh are expensive and sometimes, we need images quickly for reactive content. This is where tools such as Dall:E are valuable, creating images from text prompts and taking inspiration from thousands of sources.
We often defer to tried and tested messages when writing new copy for Paid Search Ads and Social Posts as humans. And whilst we must follow best practices, tools such as Copy:ai can offer a fresh perspective for testing.
2. Owned Content (Website Blog, CRM Emails, etc)
Authenticity and distinctiveness are crucial to brands, so using AI to create owned content across your website and email communications carries risk. While it does have the potential to homogenise copy and reduce audience engagement rates, you may not always have the time or expertise to write on specific topics, and tailoring/enhancing AI copy is much more efficient than starting from scratch. Whilst some current creative provided is basic, ChatGPT4 will be 500x smarter with 100 trillion parameters!
3. Solving Blank Page Syndrome
AI can quickly generate a wide range of inspirational jump-off points for marketers. Whether you’re working on a new product launch, a rebranding initiative, or a targeted marketing campaign, it can kickstart the ideation process. Simply provide the platform with a few key details about your project and audience, and it will generate a list of creative and relevant ideas in seconds. This not only saves time but also helps to broaden the perspective and diversity of ideas.
It is worth remembering that this technology is still in its infancy. However, while the creators are open about their platforms being a work in progress with evident flaws, using technology to help with these tasks enables your focus to shift from labour-intensive creation to efficient quality control. Fact-checking content, cross-checking copy matches brand guidelines and ensuring the outputs align with historical learnings / best practices is still crucial.
As an agency, we are still playing with these tools and exploring their strengths and weaknesses, so don’t feel you need to be any different. It’s about getting your head around the opportunities and making minor changes to the way you work because this is the start of something big.
Could you tell those one of the three recommendations wasn’t written by me but by ChatGPT? Did number three stand out? Or did the AI convince you?
If you’re interested in learning more, head over to our latest episode of the Unmuddled podcast, where Head of Planning Christian Taylor and I discuss. It’s only a 22-minute listen, and you can find that here.