In a 2023 Google business survey, 64% of tech business leaders expressed their interest in adopting generative AI models to ease their business processes. In fact, marketing automation is the name of the game in most industries these days, and generative AI is just a channel that promises to make companies more efficient while saving money at the same time. Interestingly, it is also predicted that by 2025, generative artificial intelligence might replace around 85 million jobs globally, with the banking, insurance, and energy sectors running the risk of being affected the most.

But how is the digital marketing industry dealing with the AI boom? Does the use of AI in digital marketing mean that marketers might have to struggle to be employed? Let’s look at a few jaw-dropping facts about AI and its use in the digital marketing sphere to comprehend this scene.

What is Generative AI?

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be the new buzzword in the corporate world these days. And digital marketing has not been spared of its influence either. A subset of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI revolves around the creation of content. So, is generative AI just a fad? Or is it something that’s never been seen before?

Well, generative AI, per se, has been a part of our lives since the 1960s. Yes, you heard it right! Generative AI came into the tech scene with the introduction of chatbots back in the ‘60s. But it was in 2014, when generative adversarial networks (GANs), a machine learning algorithm type, was introduced that people started using generative AI for video, audio, and image generation.

Now that we know what generative artificial intelligence is, let’s look at some of its features:

Most generative AI models rely on text-based prompts

Generative AI focuses on multiple modes of content creation, such as text, music, images, audio, video, etc.
Generative AI models can perform multiple tasks and mimic humans when it comes to the output
Generative AI models make use of neural networks to locate patterns in the existing unlabeled data sets to form new content

And rest assured, the scope of generative AI is definitely wider than AI-powered content creation tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini. What’s more fascinating is that generative AI tends to improve itself with repeated prompts. So, there’s a chance that you will get more polished content through such tools in the years to come.

How to Ace Digital Marketing Strategies Using AI

A Botco survey states that 73% of marketing departments globally are already making use of generative artificial intelligence for various functions. Apart from automating crucial marketing operations, marketers are increasingly leaning toward AI content creation and personalization depending on the market preferences. Use of generative AI for social media marketing is also on the rise.

Here is what expert Buyan Thyagarajan of Eigen X has to say about the trend: “In the next two to five years, generative AI will help create content quickly — in the form of text, video, and images. It can also create multiple variations of this content and speed up A/B testing to target different customer groups.” 

We did some research of our own in this domain and found out how generative AI is revolutionizing the field of digital marketing gradually. So, let’s dive in and see how well AI marketing works in this era:

Written content generation

AI is often used to create generic written content for marketing processes. For instance, AI can help you write or generate:

Long-form content, such as blogs on topics relevant to your business
Short-form content such as social media posts
Trending hashtags to market your product/service
Catchy taglines to attract more eyeballs
Informative product descriptions
Scripts for video content, such as product/service demo videos
E-mails

AI content creation mostly helps marketers produce content in bulk or a large scale within a minimal timeframe.

Visual content generation

You must be living under a rock if you haven’t heard of Midjourney yet. Well, in case you haven’t, it’s a phenomenally famous AI platform for image generation. And why just this platform, there are multiple such AI-driven platforms that can help with image and video generation, and the end results may stun you! Visual content created by AI can be used by marketers for generating:

Banner ads
Graphics for social media
Infographics, cover images, and internal images for blog posts
Website layouts
Brand logos
Product demo videos and other informative videos

Forget about AI-generated video campaigns, companies these days are using actual AI prompt results as part of their online ads. Heinz, for instance, created an entire YouTube video campaign using just AI prompts on “ketchup” on Dall E-2, one of the most popular AI-powered content creation tools, and showcasing the results through a video.

Hyper-personalization of marketing messages

The one-size-fits-all is passe. What works these days is customization and even hyper-personalization, in most cases. And AI-powered marketing works wonderfully well in such cases. Consumers and clients want marketing communication tailored to their tastes. So, companies are increasingly going above and beyond to cater to clients by generating personalized marketing campaigns, and AI is just making the job easier. Here’s how generative AI helps in personalization:

Analyzing vast customer data, such as browsing history and buying patterns

Creating personalized list of recommendations

Generating ads with the same theme but targeting specific demographic or other segments

Audio content generation

Does Alexa bore you a bit these days? Don’t fret. Companies these days are using generative AI to create multidimensional voice and audio to include them in their digital marketing campaigns too.

Here’s how generative AI-driven audio helps in creating marketing material:

AI voice ads: Voice input generated by AI can prompt listeners to interact through voice commands. This results in an immersive experience.
Voiceovers: Generative AI can create voice-overs for all your videos, including product descriptions and company introductions
Sound effects and music: There are AI-driven platforms that let you automate the entire ad creation process, with your choice of sound effects and music
Enhancement of customer interactions

Generative AI-powered marketing is an effective solution when it comes to dealing with customers across cultural and demographic landscapes. Generative artificial intelligence employs natural language processing (NLP) techniques to help brands connect with customers/clients of different ethnicities, genders, nationalities, linguistic origins, and political communities in a seamless manner. Here’s how generative AI-driven chatbots help businesses with customer engagement:

Real-time assistance and resolution of issues
Personalized responses to clients/customers
Overall marketing automation

Generative AI is the best bet when it comes to taking care of repetitive tasks. In fact, automating marketing workflows with AI has reduced overall marketing costs for a lot of enterprises. Some such marketing processes that can be completely automated with the help of generative AI are:

E-mail marketing: AI-driven email marketing campaigns involve sending personalized and scheduled e-mails.
Social media management: Generative AI for social media marketing encompasses creation and promotion of content and generation of engagement.
Lead generation and follow-ups: Generative AI-driven marketing mails help generate better leads due to the personalization factor. They also tend to result in less efforts for retention of such leads.

Benefits of Generative AI in Digital Marketing

By now you must be acquainted with the benefits of using AI in digital marketing. A HubSpot blog suggests that 90% of marketers that have incorporated generative AI believe it has been effective in creation of suitable content for their target markets. The future of digital marketing with AI is definitely promising! We have enumerated a few such benefits below:

Hyper-personalization enhances customer experience: This is because tailored content increases engagement and reduces the time a customer spends explaining his/her preferences.
Generative AI helps build brand loyalty: Such AI solutions with personalized and timely attention also improve customer loyalty and help companies soar above their competitors
Generative AI reaps in better conversion rates: AI marketing campaigns, since they are delivered at the right time, also increase conversion rates by leaps and bounds. A Deloitte study too proved the same.
Generative AI saves money: Strategic use of AI means you will be hiring employees only for essential and non-repetitive tasks. This saves overall costs and allows the workforce to focus on selective tasks.
Time management is a breeze with generative AI: A report stated that generative AI saves marketers over 5 hours of work per week. This is obvious, because of the workload it can manage.

Challenges of AI in Digital Marketing

Yes, AI is quick and saves costs. But is AI reliable when it comes to the quality of your content? Is AI the most effective way to generate and distribute marketing communication? Does the initiation of AI means automatically translate to a workspace without humans? The answers to all such questions lie below. In fact, everyone who’s ever been afraid of AI stealing jobs should read through the next few points, as we highlight some of the glaring challenges of AI-driven digital marketing tactics:

Quality concerns: With Google focusing on its EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness) guidelines and weeding out plagiarized content from its platform, the onus on creating quality, well-researched content is on you, and it’s dicey to leave it all to a bot.
Repetition: A lot of companies ask their content writers not to use AI tools, simply because AI tends to repeat words and passages in its content. The human element is always a safer bet when it comes to content that lacks repetitiveness.
Lack of creativity: Had AI been the solution to every problem, companies wouldn’t have hired human employees at all. It’s true AI scores well in repetitive tasks, but when it comes to creating catchy hashtags or jingles for your next ad campaign, you’d rather hire an experienced copywriter than an AI bot.
Genuineness concerns: How can a bot be original? A bot, and not just generative AI, will always depend on prompts or instructions provided to it by humans. And in case your prompts are copied or lack genuineness, your AI-generated content too will turn up uninspiring.
Fact-checking errors: Again, AI depends on data that’s made available to it and human prompts that govern it. Any error in either will prove to be damaging for your content. Fact-checking is a must when it comes to finalizing your AI-generated content, especially when it comes to content on technical aspects.
Stereotypes: Studies have proved that AI platforms such as Midjourney have biases of their own. For instance, ask such platforms to generate images of a terrorist, and they will show you images of people from a particular community. Racial or other bias, again, is based on the data AI is exposed to. So, it’s always a good idea to have a human to do the final check on such content.

Key Pointers

Generative AI mostly makes use of manual prompts to create content
Marketers are increasingly using generative AI-driven content to enhance their digital marketing components
Marketers can ace digital marketing using AI in the domain of written content, videos, audio content, images, etc.
Hyper-personalization, automating marketing workflows with AI, and enhancement of customer experience are among the main functions of this technology
Some of the benefits of generative AI are that it reduces costs, it saves time, and it offers better conversion rates
Some of the challenges of generative AI are that it can create content that’s repetitive, the content may lack originality, the facts may be incorrect, and the content may have stereotypes

Final Thoughts

Steve Jobs once said, “Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.” And we agree with him wholeheartedly. AI may be the answer to a lot of your woes, and yet, AI may not completely remove humans from the workspace. Every marketing function that relies on generative AI for better efficiency still needs a lot of human supervision. The only way AI scores is by making your job as a marketer easier. So, ditch those fears and embrace AI with an open mind! It may not resolve all your problems right away, but it can definitely make your life smoother. The future of digital marketing with AI seems quite bright!

The Role of Generative AI in Digital Marketing