How I’m Using AI As a Marketer
To say that AI changed how I’m marketing is an understatement. AI Chatbots have allowed me to increase my output, save valuable time and mental energy, and even chat with marketing legends who are no longer with us.
While you can find guides aplenty on the internet detailing the impact that AI Chatbots are having on the profession of marketing and even some theoretical implications it has for our day-to-day jobs, I figured I’d explain how I, personally, am using AI Chatbots and what my successes and failures have been so far when it comes to figuring out how to best make use of this exciting new technology.
AI Persona Generation
I’ve always found persona research and modeling to be a bit of a pain. While research is pivotal to a high-performing campaign, many of my clients don’t see it that way. They want results now. Any time spent researching is time that is not being spent directly managing their ad account in their view.
What used to take a few days now takes 10-15 minutes max. With tools like ChatGPT you could just input a prompt telling the AI to create a persona along with a full demographic and psychographic profile with just a single prompt. After that, you can query that persona in order to find out what they think of your copy or even images (if you describe the image as text well enough)
While this method isn’t perfect, it certainly lets persona models ‘come to life’ in a way they haven’t previously. You just need to maintain a critical mind in order to ensure that you aren’t mistakenly falling into the trap of thinking the AI is perfect. The AI may sometimes say contradictory things which your logical brain should tell you your target persona would not say or value. Just use common sense with this.
AI-Powered Necromancy
You can use a similar method to the persona-generation method I detailed above to generate pseudo-personas for famous figures. I’ve detailed AI Necromancy in a blog post I recently wrote. I even dive into the ethical considerations for this application.
The Failed AI Sprint Meeting
One of the pitfalls I mentioned earlier occurred when I tried to use ChatGPT to create a marketing sprint meeting. A marketing sprint, for those of you not in the know, is a method inspired by the concept of sprints in agile project management and software development methodologies. In a marketing sprint, a team comes together to work intensively on specific marketing goals and deliverables within a defined timeframe, typically ranging from one to four weeks.
The primary purpose of a marketing sprint is to achieve rapid progress and tangible outcomes by focusing efforts on a specific project or campaign.
I decided that, in lieu of having a team I’d create an AI-powered team that featured titans in the marketing and advertising world both living and dead.
It was a disaster. Turns out that ChatGPT doesn’t have the memory (even with GPT-4) to keep track of 8 different personalities. There might be other solutions for running a sprint meeting but I wasn’t able to obtain anything of practical value despite my best attempts at creating a dynamic group ‘sprint meeting’ using AI personas.
AI Copywriting
Let me assuage any fears from my fellow humans out there: AI will not be taking any serious copywriting jobs within the next decade or two. While the day may come when AI can write flawless prose, it’s simply not here yet. You know what I’m talking about. It’s patently obvious when AI writes copy – this is why products like ChatGPT won’t be passing the Turing test anytime soon.
That being said, AI-generated copy is still useful. It’s useful because it oftentimes breaks new ground or presents an angle you might not have thought of. That angle can then serve as a jumping-off point for your own copy.
Furthermore, if you aren’t a good copywriter, you can use AI to approximate the style of many advertising giants like David Ogilvy.
AI-written copy is better than poorly-written copy, after all. And, truth be told, as I look around many businesses and what they’re putting out there on Meta Ads, AI-generated copy could end up being better than 60-70% of what’s out there.
AI Data Analysis
Pulling insights from raw data has always been a time-consuming process. While AI can’t ever replicate our own analysis, it can help us make sense of numbers and turn it into easily-digestible bullet points.
Take your own performance reports from Meta or Google Ads, copy and paste entire data sets, and ask it to identify patterns.
By using AI in this way you can easily identify your top-performing audiences, ad groups, ads, images, videos, copy, headlines, or whatever else you’re looking for.
This pairs very nicely, by the way, with Meta Ads ‘Dynamic Creative’ advertising. Dynamic Creative allows you to test hundreds of ad variants easily. The difficulty in the past has been trying to wrangle all that data in order to draw solid conclusions and therefore chart the proper optimization
AI Content Marketing & Organic Social Media Marketing
Disclaimer: I don’t actually use AI to write my blog posts. All the posts on Marketing Ronin are painstakingly (and lovingly) typed by human fingers.
That being said, I do make use of AI for content marketing and organic social media posts for my clients. That’s because while Marketing Ronin is a labor of love for me, my clients don’t actually care much about the content quality that’s going out on behalf of their brands. They want efficiency and results.
Since Google isn’t actively penalizing AI-generated content at the moment (nor are any of the major social media platforms), I’ve been using AI platforms to create an entire year’s worth of blog posts and social media posts for my clients before automating delivery. This allows me to pivot and focus on marketing activities that have a higher impact while also making a play for vital organic SEO/social media traffic.
Curious to know more about how AI can help you as a marketer? I’ve put together a free PDF that will help you get started with prompts that you can use for your persona research. In order to receive it just enter your email in the form below and I’ll pop it over to your inbox in a jiffy.
Of course, AI can’t do it all. If you’re looking for a revolution in your creative output as a marketer, you should check out the Marketing Ronin Methodology.
