What does the rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) mean for the Marketing industry? This is a question that has been resonating not only in Marketing but in most industries nowadays. Marketing as an industry is not new to changes; we have seen it evolve as new technologies, platforms, and needs appear. Generative AI is the protagonist of a new pivotal point in the Marketing Industry. This new technology comes with great opportunities for companies and brands and huge challenges that will reshape how marketing is done.
How Is AI Changing the Way Marketing Is Done in Companies?
Traditionally, marketing processes such as copywriting, content creation, and branding collateral take a significant amount of human effort for creativity. Now AI systems like ChatGPT, Bard, or Imagen can generate text, video, images, and even music with minimum human input. Combined with its capacity to analyze data and customer insight, it opens the door to generating personalized content at a scale that wasn’t even imagined before. Marketers are now able to go from idea to execution in a fraction of the time it took them just a couple of months ago. AI is opening new opportunities for marketers to understand and interact with their audiences. Some of the areas where we’re seeing a greater impact are:
Automate Written Content Such as Blog Posts, Articles, and Social Media Posts
Since content generation is one of the processes that require more time and resources, It’s the one some companies are starting with. Thanks to the advance of Natural Language Processing (NLP), new technologies are now more accessible and affordable to experiment with. Organizations are using them to accelerate every step of the content-generation process such as:
- Research topics and ideas: Gathering data about a topic from a variety of sources is now a couple of clicks away.
- SEO optimization: AI can take a draft and provide improvements in keywords, headers, and the structure of the content to make it rank higher on search engines.
- Aligning style and tone: AI can follow a pre-established tone, making it easier for content creators to align with an organization’s style.
- Adapt content for multiple formats: When it comes to social media, each platform requires very specific formats, lengths, and styles. With AI, content creators can take a more traditional form of content such as an article, and transform it into multiple formats with minimum effort.
- When it comes to content creation, AI is like a virtual assistant that allows creatives to explore many alternatives, styles, and formats that result in high-quality and engaging content.
Personalization
AI allows marketers to make sense of large amounts of data to identify patterns and insights that can be missed by the human eye. Spotify and Amazon recommendations are examples of the power that AI and machine learning give companies when it comes to personalized messages, content, and products. Generative AI also allows marketers to track users’ data in real time to have a deeper understanding of how customers are interacting with their websites, app, and products and make faster data-driven decisions on their messages and product. This level of personalization has a direct impact on user engagement, conversation, and retention.
Customer Services via Chatbots and Virtual assistants
Natural Language Processing algorithms allow companies to provide 24/7 personalized customer services via chatbots. This doesn’t mean that there will not be human interaction in customer services, but the more general and basic questions can be answered in a swift and more efficient way with the right AI-powered chatbot. Many companies are already integrating these tools to handle FAQs, order tracking, or product support (password reset or account upgrade-related questions)
AI allows companies to give their customer a sense of security by providing immediate support. Also, customer service representatives can spend more time solving more complex problems while their AI mate takes care of small interactions. The right balance of human and AI tools allows companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
As with Great Power Comes Great Responsibility, Generative AI Systems Also Come with Challenges
- Quality and copyright concerns: Although it can speed up the volume of the content that can be created, this does not always translate into better quality. It is still key to spend time on the editing process to ensure quality. Also, since AI systems learn from existing sources, content can be considered plagiarism in some ways.
- Ethics and bias: Since large language models (LLM) are trained with large sets of data, this data can come with existing biases that will be translated into the output content we obtain as the outcome.
- Security challenges: Since companies are using AI to personalize content for their customers, the same tools can be used by hackers to personalize spam or phishing messages. The information we share with tools like ChatGPT also raises a security red flag on data privacy.
As with most innovative technologies, Generative AI comes with benefits and challenges for individuals and organizations. The question is not whether AI will change marketing but how fast it will be.
Would AI Boost Marketers' Creativity or Diminish It?
Most creators see AI as an advantage for their creative processes. Generative AI provides marketers and content creators with the ability to experiment, execute, and learn faster.
Campaigns that traditionally took months, can now be ready within minutes. These new horizons will allow creatives not only to think outside the box but even reshape the box they start with.
Traditionally a creative process has been very waterfall-like, with each step limited by the creators’ capabilities and technology limitations. Generative AI is not only impacting the technology available for marketers to execute creative work, but it also boosts the creator’s capabilities to identify and analyze patterns, brainstorm ideas, and experiment with new perspectives. Instead of replacing humans, AI will enhance humans when it comes to creative work.
The question is not whether AI will change marketing but how fast it will be. New tools are being developed every day and the existing ones keep improving. It is a great time for organizations to embrace AI and it is a competitive advantage to improve processes, gain user insights, and boost experimentation.
About Encora
Fast-growing tech companies partner with Encora to outsource product development and drive growth. Contact us to learn more about our software engineering capabilities.
Author Bio
Sandra Vazquez is a UX and CX leader with more than 10 years of experience helping software companies improve the user experience of their products. With an entrepreneurial background, she guides companies on how to build engaging products and impact market adoption.
In her role as Head of User Experience, Sandra works with clients from all around the world to discover their users' perspectives and translate them into actionable design solutions that ultimately drive growth.
Sandra has a bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona.
