Sarah Evans, Head of Digital at PR agency, Energy PR, offers her advice on using AI to assist with your marketing work, freeing your team up to focus on the areas where you can add the most value.
AI is not new. However, the launch of platforms like Chat GPT and Bard meant the subject flew to the top of the agenda for many marketing professionals in 2023. Even for those who are reluctant to adopt the new technology, it’s impossible to ignore the reams of news articles, LinkedIn posts, and conferences focused on AI in comms.
So, how should you be using AI in your marketing work, and are there risks involved?
Like with any technology, AI offers huge advantages to comms professionals. However, its power is limited, and human intervention remains crucial for many tasks, like human-centric storytelling and strategic thinking.
Here are our top tips for using AI to work smarter, not harder, without losing the human touch.
When to use AI
- Speeding up manual tasks
Start by asking yourself which tasks are repetitive, take the most time, and tend to be completed by more inexperienced staff members. These processes usually lend themselves very well to AI support. This might include:
- Data analysis - AI can analyse vast amounts of data far quicker than a human. So, it’s ideal for analysing things like web traffic, social media, and campaign results, giving you valuable insights to help optimise your activity.
- Repurposing copy – as marketing professionals, we spend huge amount of time creating tailored content for different audiences and platforms based on the same foundational information. Whilst human intervention is still key to this process, AI can be a good starting point, suggesting fresh formats for maximising your existing assets.
- Media monitoring – AI can scour the web and social channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, and industry trends, keeping you ahead of the curve and ready to respond to breaking and developing news and crises – without becoming a huge drain on your time.
2. Content planning
When you’re suffering from ‘blank page syndrome’, AI is a great way to get you started. Tools like Chat GPT can create initial content suggestions that you can use as a springboard for your own ideas. For example:
- Social media planning – AI can suggest content ideas, topics and themes, and relevant national awareness days to help inform your monthly content strategy. Once you’ve drafted your content, it can also help to schedule, optimise, and publish the posts. Plus, you can use it to analyse data to help with reporting too.
- Answer FAQs - AI can generate draft FAQs based on your existing knowledge, keywords, and content, giving you a head start and ensuring consistency in your messaging across all channels.
- Generating relevant hashtags – historically, trawling for appropriate hashtags for social media content was a time-consuming and manual task. Now, AI can analyse your content and suggest relevant, trending hashtags, saving you time and boosting your posts’ visibility.
When not to use AI
Of course, AI is not a silver bullet. The role of humans remains essential in comms, especially when it comes to the two key pillars of marketing:
- Creativity - AI can help get you started, support with brainstorms, and streamline processes, but it can’t replace the ability to ‘think outside the box’. So, it’s crucial you don’t rely on AI in isolation to tell your brand’s story or create innovative campaigns. AI builds on what has gone before, and innovation is breaking new ground – the two simply can’t coexist.
- Storytelling - AI is based on data. It can’t (yet) feel empathy, understand the nuances of human emotions, or comprehend cultural context – all of which are essential to powerful storytelling. Plus, because it’s based on preexisting content on the internet, it’s inherently biased. We’ve already seen brands learning this the hard way, releasing AI-powered campaigns that are tone-deaf, or worse, outright offensive.
You can use AI’s data-driven insights to help inform strategy, but drawing on your own understanding of your audience and the wider social context you’re operating within remains essential to success.
Conclusion
Ultimately, AI is another valuable addition to your toolkit. It should be used to complement your skills, not replace them. Using it smartly will free up your time for the high-value tasks that require your unique expertise and human touch.
However you feel about the onset of AI, it’s steaming ahead at pace, and you don’t want to be left behind. Now’s the time to jump in and start testing how it can help you optimise your work.
