AI won’t replace marketers—but it will make their jobs easier

Like so many industries, the marketing and PR landscape has already been affected by the rise of artificial intelligence. AI can enhance both sectors, making it easier to develop campaigns, and to evaluate those ideas’ effectiveness. AI won’t replace your marketing team, though: AI makes mistakes and gets things wrong, and should be treated as a tool—not a replacement.

Here are 10 easy ways that AI can make your marketing more innovative, effective, and targeted.

1. Create New pitches

Looking for a new spin on your product? AI services from Google, Microsoft and others can help spark inspiration from the apps you use daily. Simply open the “help me write” feature on Google Docs or CoPilot in Microsoft Word, give it a short description of your product and ask it to come up with a few pitches.

2. Generate Marketing Content

Need 10 blog posts by Tuesday? ChatGPT to the rescue: Ask it to help sketch out a rough draft for blog posts on the topic; draft versions will be cranked out in a few seconds. Be careful, though: treat these as inspiration rather than raw copy, and rework them to fit your voice and style.

3. Craft AI Prompts That Get Marketing Results

AIs work on prompts, the instructions you feed these electronic brains to create your content. Getting the best results from AI is about crafting these prompts, an art called prompt engineering. The basics? Be precise, include lots of detail for the AI to use, and split complex tasks into parts. You can also use personas, asking the AI to pretend to be something. Think of it as digital role-play. You can, for instance, ask for feedback on a marketing email from the perspective of a potential customer by describing them in your prompt. OpenAI has a great guide to the details of prompt engineering here.

4. Customize Email

AI takes personalizing how you contact customers a step further than mail merge. Instead of writing an email for everyone, you can write personalized emails that use the information you have on file for customers: their likes, dislikes, and needs. Services like Gmail and Outlook can do this right inside their apps, but they can’t handle bulk emails or personalizing using data from an outside source like your CRM system. To automate this on a larger scale, services like Attentive.com can handle large mailing lists and deliver pitches over SMS, email, or even social media.

5. Customized Chatbots

A customized chatbot can provide marketing and sales support when you are busy with other things, like sleeping or having a life. It is surprisingly easy to create a customized bot to answer questions 24 hours daily. Services like Intercom and Cody AI can do this for you, but you can also build your own for less than you think. WPBot offers a chatbot for just $50 a year if your website runs on WordPress. It’s pretty easy to use: you train the bot by answering several questions, giving it details of codes and special offers it can give out, and defining the tone and look of the bot. Then you just install their plugin, and add a single, smart code to your WordPress templates. Visitors will be greeted by a friendly customized chatbot that can offer special discounts to tempt them or answer basic questions about your products.

6. Create Social Media Content

AI can also help you use social media for marketing, creating content like Facebook and Mastodon. And it won’t cost as much as you might think: Canva, for instance, has a free tier that uses AI to design ads, pitches and other materials. I would suggest a note of caution here, though: there have been plenty of poorly configured AIs going off the rails on social media, so make sure that a human marketing person checks everything before it posts.

7. Track Brand Sentiment

Knowing what people say about your brand is a fundamental part of marketing and PR. To back up tools like Google alerts, add AI tools like Managr.ai, which can summarize the news from multiple sources and highlight mentions of your brand. Managr has a free tier that allows for up to three users.

8. Find the Right People to Pitch

These services can also offer suggestions for influencers that might suit your brand and marketing needs. Taking it a step further, there is even a new wave of AI influencers: those created by AI, such as noonoouri. That might be a step too far for most marketers, though: while some are fun, most fall right into the uncanny valley and look very artificial. AI can also suggest journalists to pitch to, but all that you need for that is right here.

9. Analyze Your SERP

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) analysis is another everyday marketing task, but it doesn’t have to be a chore. One interesting (and free to try) option is a free ChatGPT plugin called SERP Analyzer Pro. Ask it to examine the SERP of your site or that of your competitors, and it will give you a breakdown of the themes, issues, and topics that might help you improve your SERP.

10. AI Analytics

Google has not yet applied its own Gemini AI to their Google Analytics service, but that hasn’t stopped others from doing it. The analytics service Tableau has started using AI analysis on Google Analytics data, and it has a free service tier, so you can try it out. The analytics service Adzviser has also created a ChatGPT plugin that works with their analytics service, so you can ask questions and do analysis in everyday language. They offer a 14-day trial for less than a. Buck. This should be used with caution, though: remember that anything that you do on ChatGPT can end up being used to train the models behind it unless you opt out.