Generative AI has 122.58 million daily users. As a result, it's safe to say that AI is rapidly embedding itself in our personal and professional lives, and changing how we work, search, and create.
However, there’s a pretty big difference between using AI to cut corners and using AI in a way that genuinely adds value to your performance marketing.
When used right, generative AI is an incredibly helpful tool. However, using it in the wrong way can do more harm than good. As a modern marketer, it’s crucial to know how and when to use AI and when you’re better off doing the work yourself.
AI has progressed a lot, and one area where it can be incredibly useful for marketers is coding.
Whether it’s fixing a small website issue or building a webpage component, AI is often especially helpful for creating the base of your code.
The biggest caveat here is that you will need to verify the output.
AI can confidently produce code, but that doesn't mean it’s perfect, and the last thing you want on your website is broken code that creates a poor user experience, slows your site down, or breaks essential features.
Not all AI platforms are the same when it comes to creating code. Our top three recommendations are:
Marketing and spreadsheets go hand in hand. But, you no longer need to waste half an hour figuring out how to use an Excel formula. Instead, you can simply explain to AI what you’re trying to achieve and it will give you a formula, with explanations. Any errors can usually be troubleshooted with AI, too.
Analysing campaigns, identifying trends, and assessing performance is incredibly important, but it is also time consuming. You can use AI to speed this process up, giving you more time to focus on managing campaigns and making effective improvements.
You do need to be wary that if your tracking isn’t set up properly or you provide outdated or incomplete data, you could be given poor, even harmful, insights. Similarly, AI can misinterpret data and get things wrong, so you should always check for consistency and accuracy before acting on insights or finalising reports.
Reports, briefs, and presentations (especially client-facing ones) need to be clear and professional. But creating templates can get repetitive and take up a considerable amount of time.
Instead of starting out with a blank document, you can get AI to create a rough draft by prompting it with your requirements and sharing an example. AI should return a structured template that you can refine and send to your team.
Admin is inevitable. In marketing, it’s not uncommon to spend just as much time organising your work as it is actually doing the work itself. Keeping these tasks to a minimum can improve your workload if you often feel bogged down by admin.
AI is usually pretty effective when it comes to summarising meeting notes, coordinating calendars, and creating a list of actions. Although, if you find it’s taking hours to check its work, maybe skip this one.
AI can easily write an article on pretty much any topic, but that doesn’t mean you should use it to churn out tons of content.
Research has found that AI-generated content won’t hurt your rankings. Google itself states in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines that ‘the use of Generative AI tools alone does not determine the level of effort or Page Quality rating’. However, it is considered scaled content abuse when AI is used as a ‘low-effort way to produce many pages that add little to no value for website visitors’ or when almost all of the main content on a page is AI-generated with ‘little to no effort, little to no originality, and little to no added value for visitors’.
If you publish a boat load of AI content, you may notice a spike in traffic and rankings at first, but this will likely drop off almost immediately (and you may end up with a penalty). So, in most cases, it’s not a good long-term solution.
AI can be used as a starting point though. It can be good for idea generation, creating content outlines, improving sentence clarity, and speeding up the research process.
There are plenty of dos and don’ts when it comes to using AI in your content strategy. The bottom line is, you can use it as a base but all AI-generated content should have plenty of human input.
AI can analyse competitors, spot market trends, and offer helpful insights, but it doesn’t have a comprehensive understanding of your company like your marketing team does.
It doesn’t know the ins and outs and the nuances of your business, so while it can be used to inform certain aspects of your strategy, it shouldn’t be relied on for final decision making.
Once you’ve shared something, there is no undo button, so be very careful about putting sensitive business or customer information through an AI tool. This includes everything from confidential campaign data to customer details.
Always follow your company’s data protection and security policies, and if you have any doubts, it’s best to leave it.
AI is great for automating repetitive or time consuming tasks, giving you more time to focus on effective strategies that drive you or your client’s business forward. However, it’s not perfect. AI does have its limits, and for the time being, there are very few tasks that don’t require at least some human intervention.
The biggest mistake marketers are making is using AI to replace instead of supplement. Use AI as a base for content, templates, data analysis, and coding, but always check the work and make edits where appropriate.
If you need expert help taking your performance marketing to the next level, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today.
