Right now you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the ONLY question… Put AI in front of, or behind any product or service you’re offering, especially in marketing and you can pretty much guarantee an increase in sales, or at least an increase in the price you can charge, such is the appetite for AI right now.
What’s driving this desire? Well, it’s only human nature to look for a short cut, look for the easy way to do something to try and minimise the amount of work we actually have to do. There’s no doubt AI has the capacity to help us save time, to help us process more data faster, find the answers to things we don’t know and also to actually teach us how to do tasks we currently don’t know how to perform. There is also FOMO which is an exceptionally powerful emotion. We feel like we’re missing out, or getting left behind, or giving up an advantage to our competitors. So finding a way to implement AI can definitely help us take the easy route, and also alleviate theta fear of getting left behind.
But just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. So, the question then becomes, is AI really ‘all that’ and should we be clambering over one another to get to it?
Now, before the gurus who are flogging all sorts of products for all manner of insane prices come at me for trying to derail their gravy train, let me be clear. I’m a massive fan of AI. We use it. A lot. We’re planning to use it a lot more. If you’re not using it in your business you better start! But HOW, and WHEN can make all the difference.
So back to the question, is AI really a magic bullet?
If you know me and my content you already know the answer…
It depends…
What are you using AI for? What are your goals? Who is driving it? How much time do you have to invest in ‘training’ it? Is the task mission critical?
All these things are relevant in determining whether or not AI is the right move.
Let’s look at messaging for example. Your messaging really needs to set you apart from your competitors. It needs to clearly articulate how YOUR product or service is unique and how it solves a problem more effectively than anyone else’s. Messaging of all kinds should be written in your tone of voice and specifically taiored for your target audience. Whether it’s a social media ad, post, a blog, newsletter or sales page, your messaging needs to be spot on. AI content, by design, is simply a summary of everything else on the internet, so it’s not unique to you or your business. The internet is full of vanilla, dull, boring content and if you’re relying on AI to write your content, that’s what you’re going to get.
I’m not saying don’t use something like ChatGPT to write your content, I’m saying use it as a starting point not a total solution because at this point in time, you still need human intervention to refine your messaging.
I know, I know, AI can be trained. And it’s getting better literally hour by hour as the knowledge base grows. But right now, for messaging, it’s not quite there and still needs you, or your copywriter, to produce the final content.
Now, for technical tasks that are heavily reliant on data analytics and interpretation it’s a different story. This is where AI shine the brightest.
If you’re optimising a Google ad campaign, making technical adjustments to your coding, or making data driven decisions about the quality of your website traffic, AI can be all over it! With it’s ability to perform millions, billions or even trillions of calculations per second, no human brain is ever likely to be able to process, analyze and make recommendations based on the volume of data that AI can.
Tools like AdEspresso are becoming more accessible, affordable and day by day they’re getting better and better. Tools like ChatGPT can even help you perform tasks you don’t know how to perform, by scouring the far corners of he internet for instructions. AI is even prooposing some really interesting marketing strategy which can then be refined and customised in half the time it would take to build it from scratch.
Technical tasks is one area you should definitely be investing time and energy to implement AI into your marketing.
On the flipside, however, most of the ad platforms have their own AI ad optimisations and some are not great. Advantage+ Audience in the Meta ads Manager for example, is the default setting now, which is great for convenience but maybe not for results. If you’re new to Meta ads it can be very tempting to take their advice and go with their suggestion if allowing the AI to do all the hard work. However, if you have a new ad account, or you’ve never really had any success with your ads, the AI doesn’t have the data it needs to make good decisions, and the results will reflect this.
There are also other AI optimisations turned on by default such as editing your copy, your headlines, your images and even which card appears first if you’re using carousel ads. None of these take into consideration your objectives, or whether or not you’ve structured your images and copy that way for a reason. Be wary of using them just because it’s the easy way out.
AI in graphic design programmes like Canva still has a little way to go before it can handle more complex tasks like creating images of people based on text inputs. Others, however, like Midjourney are creating some incredible imagery and are definitely worth looking into.
We’re also seeing some great results from AI powered chatbots, like Tidio. These help you save time, if the knowledge base on your website is complete, they can answer 80% of questions your website visitors are likely to ask and provide a really positive user experience. If you’re interested in deploying an AI bot on your website, reach out to us for a chat HERE
Many years ago one of my high school english teachers taught us the saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’ and it’s never been more true than with AI. It’s only as good as its knowledge base. If you can feed it with good, comprehensive data sources, and well constructed prompts you’ll get exceptional output. If you can’t , you won’t. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.
So the question, ‘To AI, or not to AI’ comes back to your goals, how it can help achieve them, the specific task itself and how good is that data it has to work with.