Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere right now, and for many local businesses, it raises a reasonable question, “Can I just use AI to handle my marketing now?”
There’s no question AI has and will continue to change marketing. We use it, and chances are, you do too. If you’re not using it, you are definitely seeing it during the course of your day, including the picture on this blog. It can help develop ideas, write and refine copy, create variations of an ad, analyze information, and accomplish in minutes what may have taken hours in the past. But being able to create something faster doesn’t necessarily mean you’re creating the right thing. One of the biggest advantages of AI is speed. Instead of staring at a blank screen trying to come up with a headline, email, social post, or campaign idea, you can have several options in seconds. That’s incredibly useful.
The challenge is knowing what to do with those options or which ones are best. Ask AI for a marketing campaign and it will give you one. Ask it for 20 headlines and you’ll have them almost instantly. But which headline is best for your business? Which audience should you be targeting? How much should you invest? What tactics are best, search, display, streaming video, email, social media, or a combination? And how long should your campaign run? Those decisions still require personal strategy and experience.
AI has access to an incredible amount of information, but it doesn’t know your business, your customers, or your local market and that matters. A business in Concord, New Hampshire may need a very different approach than a similar business in Boston. A local contractor trying to generate leads needs a different strategy than a restaurant trying to drive traffic this weekend or a bank promoting a new checking account. That’s where the human side of marketing and experience become even more important.
It can help us get to ideas faster, but experience can determine which ideas make sense. It can help draft the message, but a human still needs to make sure that it relates and represents the business behind it. It can help organize campaign data, but numbers alone won’t tell you what next steps to take.
I don’t think the question is whether AI will replace marketers. The better question is, how much better can good marketers be now? They can spend less time on tasks and more time thinking about the strategy. They can test and analyze more ideas, while making adjustments more quickly. Allowing more time to be spent working with businesses to understand what they’re actually trying to accomplish. In other words, AI shouldn’t remove the human part of marketing. It should give us more time to focus on it.
The best approach right now is human input, human oversight and human output, utilizing AI to make everything in between faster and more efficient.
At NNEdigital, we use technology that helps make campaigns more efficient. We still believe in understanding the business and what they are trying to accomplish, then utilizing proven strategies with modern technology. The game is changing fast, but the overall principles have been the same for generations. Reach the right people, at the right time, with the right message, now using the right tools.
Not sure what makes sense for your business? Contact NNEdigital and let’s talk about your goals, your audience, and how the right combination of technology and strategy can help you reach them.