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In a world increasingly interested in AI, marketers grapple with how to add these new tools to their toolbox while maintaining efficiency and integrity.
Our friends at HubSpot recently released a survey of over 1350 US business professionals which unveils some intriguing insights. 62% of these business leaders say their company has already invested in AI and automation tools for their employees to leverage. Of those, 71% report seeing a positive ROI, and 72% say AI and automation make their employees more productive.
Let’s look at a few of the top reasons marketers chose to work with AI, and some helpful tips on how to smooth your journey into an AI world.
Gives You Time to Focus on Your Most Impactful Tasks
90% of marketers say AI and automation helps them spend less time on manual tasks.
One of the reasons that AI has become a focus among marketers is that they’ve realized there’s a clear difference between high-impact work - like creative brainstorming, strategizing, project execution, and people management - and low-impact work which likely includes menial, mindless, and repetitive tasks. The high-impact work is rewarding and satisfying to do.
AI often allows them to spend more time on the parts of their job they enjoy most (80%), and more time on the creative aspects of their role (79%).
Gives You a Good Head Start on Content
Writing from a blank screen is tough. You open your template, and you sit and stare at it. Even if you know what you want to say, converting that to words is often a challenge. Generative AI can help with that.
Marketers today are using AI to conduct research and to get inspiration and ideas for their content. Simply ask a tool like ChatGPT and it can quickly review all the information available online and present it back to you in a conversational fashion, making it easy to digest.
AI tools help marketers find the most relevant information, and they present it clearly and succinctly. It can be a starting point, and a way to get ideas rolling.
But It Is a Threat To Your Job?
There is a lot of chatter about AI taking marketing jobs. Fear makes for great headlines, doesn’t it? But will AI actually replace a human marketer?
While it may help marketers with the more mundane marketing tasks, it is highly unlikely that AI will replace marketers themselves. Marketing is all about creativity, and requires an understanding of human behavior. Successful marketing needs originality and a creative spark only humans can possess. Despite its efforts to replicate it, AI doesn’t have that capacity.
Also worth noting, AI has a tendency to be inaccurate. Very inaccurate. Almost half of marketers using generative AI say they have received information that they know is incorrect, and only 23% of marketers surveyed said they are very confident that the information generative AI produces is accurate. Those aren’t great odds.
We’ve all seen content that is clearly AI-created, and by the second page the sentences have stopped making any sense at all. Content needs a human touch to review, to revise, and to make it valuable to a reader.
Knowing Where to Start is Key
Before going all-in on AI, start with a strategy. Determine what do you plan to use AI for - email, blog content, keyword planning for SEO? Do you have the best tools for your needs? Are you trained in how to use them?
Ensure you are using AI effectively, and ethically, and your AI initiatives will achieve better results, save time and resources, and, ultimately help you enhance your marketing strategy to better connect with your customers.
AI fears shouldn't hinder exploration. With the right strategy, processes, and education, the journey to implementing generative AI can ensure that it becomes a valuable marketing tool in your toolbox.
