Traditional Marketing AIn’t Gonna Cut It

With the sweeping introduction of ChatGPT in November of 2022, there has been very little that the world of AI hasn’t touched, from global leaders questioning its safety and awareness to students using it to write their essays. 

The functionality and prowess of AI capability are vast, and we’re already beginning to see how it is creeping into everyday life. 

From a marketing perspective, introducing AI tools was at the core of our content. Copy.ai came on the scene in 2020 for short-form copies (think ads, tag lines, etc.) and Jasper (formally Jarvis.ai) for the more extensive brand needs—tone and art included. 

These tools were on the scene before ChatGPT, so why are we so focused on AI in marketing now? 

What does AI have to do with marketing? 

In short—efficiency. Creating one-of-a-kind, original content is hard work that takes time. The time that some marketers no longer have. Marketing and its strategy have been in flux since 2020, so getting it “right the first time” has been at the forefront of new tools. The appeal is getting the creative juices flowing while keeping content on brand, with the right tone, and creating multiple assets. Enter AI, ready, willing, and able to solve this problem.

Should I be using this?

It depends. Do you value the product and what it’s producing for your needs? After all, the race to include AI in content production tools is on. For example, the AI Writing Assistants category has 183 products listed on G2.com and growing, while the Content Creation category has 249. These tools are often used in tandem to create and publish content more efficiently. Some of them are even interchangeable when it comes to producing written content. 

The idea is to lessen the labor on creative teams to produce campaigns, emails, etc., out faster. In an ideal world, each piece would be ripe with the brand tone of voice, palette, and segment appropriate, precisely what a human would create with countless hours of care. But where does the line between efficiency and creativity meet?

Regardless of the strategy employed, AI tools should be viewed as a sidekick to the creatives—not a replacement. Marketing taps into human emotion, which will hopefully remain a humanity-exclusive capability.

AI and its marketing effectiveness

Intuit Mailchimp and Constant Contact launched integrative AI-driven capabilities into their existing products in April this year. 

Both products cater to marketers and small to midsize businesses. Intuit Mailchimp focused on highly personalized email content, while Constant Contact opted for a multi-channel content generator. Their goals are similar in that they both want to make this brave new world of marketing accessible to a broader audience. 

AI is shifting possibilities so much that in the last two years, we have witnessed firsthand the changing of the guard, so to speak. Without a doubt, a new era of marketing capabilities has officially entered the chat. 

Over the last six months, the AI Writing Assistants category's pageviews have surpassed that of the Content Creation category by over 300%. This is what users are looking for, and while some content creation tools already include AI, the buzzword has staked its claim.

Is AI implementation worth it? 

Regardless of your outlook on introducing AI to your martech stack, the views speak for themselves. And as any marketer knows, you’re only as good as your timing. 

Try to look at where the baseline of functionality lies for your teams and where AI would actually make a trackable difference rather than being a trend. Results are varied based on the type of creative AI but the long term outcome can prove to be a time saver for design and copy teams.

Edited by Shanti S Nair