How to Maximize Marketing Efficiency with AI

How should you scale AI with your company?

I am often asked this question often when I give talks about AI or during my marketing training or workshops.

Here are two options to approach it:

• Top-down
• Bottom-up

Top-Down

Leadership will take an organizational-wide initiative and identify AI tools that employees can use. They may source AI writing assistant tools that everyone can use. In this case, the AI tools are likely to be for general usage.

In some cases, specific departments will also source specific AI tools. However, you need to know specifically what you want AI to do, how to balance AI vs. humans, and how to make the transitions from AI to humans or vice versa as part of your workflows.

Bottom-Up

At the individual level, marketers can easily identify and source AI tools to help do their jobs better. Yet at the group or organization level, marketers (me included) often struggle to identify where AI can help.

Before You Implement AI

Regardless top-down or bottom-up, you need to ask two important questions:

1. What should I optimize with AI?
2. Which AI tools should I use?

Step 1: Identify Where AI Can Help

Before you choose which AI tools to implement, you have to evaluate where AI can actually make a difference in your marketing strategy by improving efficiency without sacrificing quality.

So, what could AI do?

Here are some marketing tasks AI can help with:

• Data Analysis: Merge first-party data with secondary and third-party data to conduct additional analysis to gain insights about your customers, products, segmentations, or even marketing campaigns.
• Task Automation: Identify repetitive tasks and have AI take a go at them first.
• Personalized Engagements: It can be as simple as “make recommendations based on what you purchased before” to “customize pricing based on your needs.” The marketing and communication angles can be endless, from customized product offerings, in-depth customer segmentations, personalized content and ad displays, down to dynamic pricing and promotions.
• Predictions and Recommendations: Use customer datasets to predict outcomes of specific questions or hypotheses. For example: predicting the win rate of existing sales pipelines or anticipating the content that your prospect may consume based on their challenges. What can you do to “gauge” their next steps?
• Content Creation: Generative AI is a great way to create a first draft of your content to work with, from text for blogs and e-books, to audio and video scripts.
• Media Buy: Using AI is nothing new in the programmatic buying-and-selling advertising space. New AI usage can expand analysis of vast data sets for media pre-planning, search advertising, audience segmentation, real-time bidding, creative optimization, predictive analytics, and cross-channel integration—ultimately improving engagement and campaign performance.
• Research: AI disrupts marketing research in the fields of advanced data analysis, complicated text analysis, and automated stats analysis. In the data aggregation process, researchers can collect and analyze large swaths of data from various resources.
• Strategy and Planning: You can write prompts to ask AI to craft marketing plans and campaigns.
• Brainstorming and Ideation: Ask AI chatbots for any recommendations and suggestions on how to run a workshop or a planning session. You can even ask how to do your job better or give it questions from your management and senior executives.
• ICP and Persona Building: You can enter your existing customer information and ask AI to craft your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) as ideal accounts and buyer personas for your marketing customer segmentations.
• Customer Journey Mapping: If AI can help you with strategy, planning, brainstorming, and persona building, you can also build your customer journey map based on your existing marketing channels.

This list is only the beginning of how you can integrate AI into your marketing workflows! The key is to identify where AI can fit in first.

Always keep in mind that AI is a powerful tool for human marketers, not a replacement for them. For every step you integrate AI, you’ll need superstar marketers orchestrating and overseeing everything AI produces before accepting it at face value.

Which leads us to…

Step 2: Decide Which AI Tools to Use

Most AI for marketing comes in the form of generative AI (or gen AI), typically as large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or AI image generators like Midjourney.

However, there are also many sub-varieties of gen AI. You could use the base versions of LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude, custom GPTs, AI trained for specific tasks like Jasper for copywriting or DeepConverse for customer service, and so on.

The language part of LLMs comes from how you interact with them by giving text instructions, known as prompts. No matter which type of AI for marketing you use, you’re going to be writing prompts—and you’ll need to be a pro at it!

To learn how to perfect your prompt writing, I highly recommend you check out my book The Modern AI Marketer: Guide to Gen AI Prompts. You’ll find over 75 prompt examples to help you hit the ground running, and you’ll also learn the best prompt engineering techniques for crafting your own prompts.

Once you really get the hang of prompt engineering for singular tasks, you’ll be ready to take things to the next level by either creating a custom GPT, integrating an API, or creating your own model from scratch.

OK, I’m getting ahead of myself!

When evaluating AI to optimize your marketing, you need to deeply look into which AI tools are available to you.

Ask yourself if the tools will really improve quality, reduce time, increase revenue, and help drive the overall goals of your business. Ask your marketing and sales teams how they might use the AI tools in their processes. Don’t forget to ask the AI tools’ support reps how the AI tools could integrate with the marketing tech stack you already use. Ask all these questions and then some!

There are few different ways to implement AI marketing:

1. Vendors’ AI Features: Consider the marketing tools you already use. Many of them are starting to offer built-in AI features. Investigate what they offer and how those features can augment your existing workflows.
2. Base-Level Models: Test out using the basic versions of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude to get a feel for interacting with gen AI. They can be pretty useful for small, one-off tasks. Just don’t share any proprietary information!
3. Customized Models: ChatGPT now offers the ability to create custom GPTs that are pre-trained for specific tasks. You can try out publicly available ones other users have made, or you can build your own with the user-friendly builder interface. No coding required!
4. Third-Party AI Tools: There are more and more third-party AI tools coming to market every day, all designed for different marketing tasks, from content creation to customer support, data analysis, and beyond. Do your research, talk to their reps, and compare what they offer before making your final decision.
5. Build Your Own Model: This is the most costly and resource-intense option of all. It’s very unlikely you will need to build your own model. Think of this step as a last resort and only for large enterprises.

Don’t Approach AI Blind

AI is just another technology to help marketers automate and be more productive. The key is for us to understand what it is, what it can do, identify where AI can help us, and find ways to bring AI into our processes and workflows.

This is the irony of AI: It’s not here to replace marketers (maybe it will, maybe it won’t…) but to instead help us be more efficient and productive so that we can deliver a highly personalized and more humane experience for our customers.

If you want to know more about scaling AI in your company, prompt engineering and data management, and starting AI initiatives in your business, you’ll want to read my latest book, The Modern AI Marketer in the GPT Era.

I wrote it particularly with B2B marketers in mind to guide you through marketing in this new and exciting era of AI. You can also pair it with my companion book mentioned earlier, The Modern AI Marketer: Guide to Gen AI Prompts!

Reach out to me if you have any questions in your AI marketing journey!